Naruto: Berserk
by Lousy Poet Automaton
Summary: The Seal was supposed to trap the great demon into the child... except there was already something there. Naruto lives with a lifetime of memories not his own, and a cursed brand with a far worse legacy than any other.
1. Chapter 1

Story summary:

This was not supposed to happen. The fox demon should have been sealed, its power sucked down into the labyrinth - a chakra construct nearly a world of its own, powered by the contract with the spirit of Death. Instead, a ring of flames pulsed around the baby, black fires dancing among the red, no, warring with and smothering the red. "It is almost as if," Yondaime, dying, murmured to Sarutobi, "...there is something else already there... something... worse..."

And then as new shadows spread across the battlefield, unnatural, creeping darknesses, the screaming began all over again.

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 1: Black Student, Pale Genius

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

The conversation died away when he walked through the doorway. Oh, he was much larger than a normal boy of his age, it was true – he looked about three to four years older than his age, but it was not his height, or the unusual development of the muscles revealed by his sleeveless black tunic, that silenced the other kids. It was not his steel-studded leather vest or the heavy, baggy pants suggesting that he had come from some colder (and more openly violent) place, or the wild hair that thrust out of his head like black fire, or the cold sneer on his face, or even the bruises and scars on his arms and face.

It was the sword.

Only, it did not look like any sword the other kids had ever seen, not like the slender, slightly curved katana used by some of the weapon-specialized ninja. In the hands of an adult, it would have perhaps looked like one of the straight great swords from the ancient West like those in the museum, but no it did not even look like one of those, not truly. It did not look like a sword.

It looked more like a slab of steel.

It was thicker than any sword they had ever seen, and in length from point to the massive pommel it was very nearly the new boy's height. He did not carry it in a scabbard (which would have made drawing it impossible due to its disproportionate length) – the blocky crosspiece hung from from a clever arrangement of hooks on the leather harness that crisscrossed his back.

Curiously, there were two sets of four finger-sized holes cut through the broad surface of the blade, aligned along the fuller. One set was a few inches back from the point, another set was a third of the way down from the hilt.

He ignored the stares, strode across the room, and, drawing the massive blade casually, easily, he sat in the empty chair closest to the windows. The chair creaked from the strain. He slouched back in his chair, thrust his long legs straight out before him, crossing his heavy boots one on top of the other. He placed the point of the blade against the wooden floor, ignoring the way it scraped the surface, and rested the hilt against his shoulder.

He looked out at the sky, and ignored the whispering that started up.

"Hey, you. New guy."

The boy sighed pointedly, and turned to look at the other who was perched on top of his table.

The irritant was one of the larger kids in the class, though a lot of that was probably from the ridiculously baggy jacket he had on (and he was still both shorter and not nearly so powerfully built as the seated stranger), and the hood drawn over his head. It must have been uncomfortably hot. There were red tattoos on his face, simple marks down his cheeks like fangs. There was a little dog perched on his head, yipping madly at the seated boy.

"How do you get off appearing out of nowhere just in time for the exam? And Akamaru says you smell evil."

"...Whatever." He looked back out at the clouds. The one with the dog was like his dog, small, insignificant. He could feel it in the lack of power in the other.

"Think you're tough? Why I ought to - "

"Kiba! Sit down NOW." The teacher had arrived, a prissy, skinny looking fellow.

Grumbling, Kiba backed off.

"As for you, Uzumaki, right? That ugly thing you've got is damaging the floor. Get a scabbard, or I'll confiscate it."

Naruto's sneer grew. His eyes tightened, and the other students shied away. Some of the better students had learned from their lessons that this was called killing intent. Naruto's was raw, and uncontrolled. Like a beast's. And more than this... it was huge. Looking at him, he suddenly seemed far larger, towering over them all even from his seated position. The chuunin instructor seemed to deflate, seemed tiny in comparison. "Take it from me. If you can, sensei."

"Alright, that's it, trouble-maker. Detention. Now."

Naruto just laughed. "Fine."

He ignored the talking to he received, refused to write an apology, refused anything. And when the other instructor, a long-time administrative chuunin, already an old man, also mentioned taking away the 'eyesore' Naruto carried, an animal snarl was enough to make him pale and back away, spluttering threats about expulsion.

"You won't get the Hokage to sign off on that. I'm only here for the genin exam tomorrow. But if you can, then do it! Or do you want to FIGHT ME?"

He did not get expelled.

---

After school, a number of the boys tried to intimidate him and failed utterly. Just as he was going to totally ignore them and stalk off, shuriken blurred in. Disinterestedly, he batted them away with his left forearm, the studded leather bracer protecting it from the shuriken, which were too light to penetrate much even had they been thrown with more skill.

"You don't want to do that again," he said, almost bored. It was that puppy boy. Worthless.

Two more and Kiba was charging him behind the thrown weapons. Naruto just leaned his head, merely being nicked on the cheek by one of them.

"You're pissing me off." And then he moved.

From utter stillness to sudden motion, Naruto drew steel with preternatural speed into an overhead chop that was inexorable, unstoppable. And there was the sound, almost a moaning whistle, caused by the odd aerodynamics of the holes in the blade. The handful more of shuriken had glanced off the vest, accomplished nothing. Kiba froze as the dark blur descended towards him... He had still been ten feet away! He tried to stop, to backpedal, to get away somehow! Was this death?

It stopped just in front of his eyes. The blast of wind from the thick steel ramming through the air blew the hood back off Kiba's head. If he had tripped and fallen forward in his desperate attempt to halt his forward motion, he might have cracked his head on that thing even if Naruto had stopped the strike.

Naruto chuckled. He could smell the piss of the puppy on its master's clothing.

None of the boys could believe the speed of that draw, or even that a boy their age could hold a sword like that straight out with only one hand, and stop the tremendous momentum in his swing. The others had only just started to get their hands on their weapons.

"It's like this. Those little pins and blades you're taught to throw, they might put me down, if you get lucky and hit a vital spot. This ugly thing in my hand, though... It's not very sharp, but it's three times the thickness of a normal sword. If I hit you with this, well..." He just smiled. "I'd love to properly christen this baby. So come on, then. Come at me, but if you come at me, you better do your best to kill me. Or I, I will kill you." A mad light flickered to life in his eyes, which darkened from blue to something else, something deep, and not altogether sane.

The circle faded back as quickly as it had started to close in. The girls looked at him with a disdain tinged with fear, and from most of the boys, he could smell growing anger that was almost hatred, also rooted in fear. Except for one set of eyes.

"I'll fight you," this one said quietly, simply.

The girls gasped, murmured.

Naruto's sneer faded. Something about this one was familiar, so familiar... so like the Other in his dreams, something in the arrogance of the set of the shoulders, the quiet confidence in the expressionless face, and ah, yes, that face... its delicate, almost girlish symmetry. Yet, despite his pale, milk-white skin, this one was dark, like himself, rather than the deceptive lightness of that most hated dream Other's beginning.

It set the mark on his neck that no one could see to burning, a subtle pain that made him bite down so hard his jaw ached.

"Uchiha. Sasuke. That is my name. You look strong. But slow."

Again, from an attitude of relaxed stillness, Naruto exploded into motion, turning from where Kiba had stumbled backwards onto his ass and turning the blade with the weight of his own body into a blurring, shallow descending cut from left to right.

There was the crack of an impact, and iron shards scattered about them. A number of girls screamed.

"Or maybe not that slow. But not fast enough."

The Uchiha crouched on the flat of his blade! Feet chakra-bonded to the steel, left arm extended out, holding a kunai to Naruto's face.

Naruto laughed. He saw the Uchiha's right hand held out awkwardly to one side, trembling and bloody from the the pieces of the kunai he had used to partially deflect the stroke. Yes, the pretty boy was faster. But not that much faster, not enough to dodge cleanly.

The eyes though... They had changed. Hmm, three marks spinning around red irises... High level doujutsu, though Naruto could not quite recall the specifics of the Uchiha-type eyes. Still, it would not matter, regardless of the other's bloodline - Naruto had years of combat experience outside the village in this life, learning to control the cursed mark on his neck and what that meant in regard to demons.

"You talk too much!" Chakra flares burst into life around Naruto, arcs of black light.

Like an animal, Naruto snapped forward, closing his jaws around the kunai's blade. The muscles in his neck and shoulders stood out under the skin in stark relief. Though the blade was angled and not flat enough for a good grip, the sheer power in his muscles, combined with an overwhelming burst of chakra to his mouth and teeth, held the kunai immobile despite Sasuke's attempts to thrust it forward or draw it back for a better strike.

Without releasing the kunai from his mouth, Naruto roared through his teeth. He swung the massive blade with both hands in a rising cut as he drove forward with his legs, catapulting the smaller boy off and thirty feet back.

Sasuke landed easily on his feet, hands in position before him, ready to take the fight to the next level. He wondered if his flames would be effective against this wild man. The heavy gear wasn't just for show – it was armor, heavier than most ninja wore, and he could sense chakra flowing through it. But just as quickly as the dark chakra had risen around his opponent, it was fading, and he realized that the strange sound coming from Naruto was laughter escaping around the kunai that he still gripped tightly in his mouth. He spat it out and it whistled towards Sasuke backwards, like a bullet.

Easily caught, though Sasuke eyed the light coat of spit on the blade with something less than the easy detachment he had been showing. There were tooth marks in the iron. Not that kunai were well-tempered steel, since they were disposable throwing weapons and not worth tempering to a high grade the way proper daggers or swords were, but it wasn't everyday that the Uchiha had one kunai suffer a spectacular stress failure in the face of spectacular force and another damaged by teeth. He did not show it, but one hand throbbed from the vibrations that had shivered the other lost kunai to pieces, never mind the slivers that cut into his palm.

"You're tough, girlie Uchiha! Tougher than the rest. That's good!" Naruto sheathed the blade. "You should bandage your hand, girlie. Your groupies would hate it if you got those pretty fingers scarred."

Sasuke arched one eyebrow, let the power fade from his eyes.

"Interesting. When you pass tomorrow's exam, you can be my subordinate."

Naruto was torn between the desire to laugh and to scowl. Yes, so much like that other, and yet different too. Would he never escape those ghosts, even in this world?

"You're no hawk, Uchiha. You aren't sharp enough yet, I can feel it. But I see you have seen blood, and in that, you are more of a man than these children."

Sasuke shook his head. "You'll pass tomorrow. And you'll be on my team."

---

The instructor had wanted to fail him, of course. He did not know bunshin or henge, the two techniques that were tested for. Why would he? He only learned what was useful to him, and out there, such paltry tricks were useless against his prey.

"I haven't learned to do them. Instead, you'll pass me when I show you that they cannot be used against me."

And he did just that, though it was only after he had the dull point of his sword pushing slowly, inexorably into the chuunin's throat that they allowed him to pass.

And so another day went by, and, as the Uchiha had predicted, they were teammates, along with a pretty, but useless girl, all paper-smarts and no practical skill.

They met their jounin instructor, a lazy-looking, slender man only a little taller than Naruto, and not as broad in the shoulders. But, despite his tardiness, this one, Naruto could respect.

So he chuckled at the jounin's words to them, revealing nothing but his name. This Kakashi's appearance, the subtle, bone-deep weariness that only one who had seen death on countless battlefields could identify, was more than enough to tell Naruto everything he needed to know. He could feel it in the other, the taint of deaths on the gray-haired one's hands, the loss and sorrow, and yes, guilt, hidden beneath a shallow smile hidden beneath a mask.

Naruto parroted the jounin's nondisclosure right back at him, shrugged when the response was a flicker of irritation in the single exposed eye.

The girl, Sakura, had blathered, pointlessly. He needed to know nothing more of her – at this stage in her life, she was a child in a game, not a killer in a community of which the primary income was from hiring out killers, soldiers and spies. In fact, he was impressed at the Uchiha's restraint at her clinging, useless ways. He did not just tolerate her, he cultivated her. Like a pet bird.

The Uchiha's words, however, made his heart stop. Had he really been able to dismiss him so casually two days before?

"Uchiha, Sasuke. I train. I study. Arts, literature, history, combat. Of dreams, I have two. The selfish, personal one is to kill a man. The other... I wish to unite all the ninja villages under my control, to be a Kage among Kage, and end the continuous warfare of the past hundred years."

Sakura exclaimed, starry-eyed, "Wow, Sasuke-kun, that's such a noble ideal! I'll be the one to - "

But she may as well not have been there. She trailed off when she realized that both Kakashi and Sasuke were paying more attention to Naruto's soft-spoken whisper.

"Uchiha. Your ambition... Hah! I understand vengeance, and that's fine. But you as the unifier? Can your wings carry your dream, or will you fall and bring us all down with you?" Naruto closed his eyes and trembled. The memories flooded through him, the years that were not his own, the lifetimes of a scarred, broken warrior, betrayed and living only for vengeance. And yet astonishingly, the idea still tugged at him. Was that the part of him that should have been a child in this life, or the innocent that had never been allowed to be a child in the other? He grit his teeth. "What if I kill you before you get that far, Uchiha?"

The killing intent around him weighed Sakura down so heavily it was difficult for her to breathe.

Sasuke smiled pleasantly. He blinked twice, and the sharingan came alight in his timeless gaze. It made it easier to replay the other day's combat in his head. And it made it easier to analyze the subtle facial muscle responses, the changes in breathing, minute alterations in composure. It was not as accurate as the byakugan in terms of reading people, as that revealed a host of responses even beneath the skin and superficial muscles, but it was still more than normal eyes could see.

"You swing your sword as though each strike is your last, as though you scream out your life, and your death, each time. These eyes of mine see it, and I know you have no purpose. Your life is empty. You will be my right hand when I get there, I know it. In fact, I'll give you Konoha – you can be the Hokage, with a whole village of precious ones to protect as your purpose. At my bidding."

The words ripped him deep. It was happening again. Was it him? Could it possibly be him? He had been so sure it was just a coincidence, but if it was not, what did it all mean? Was he still trapped by another life's destiny?

"Maybe I will, Sasuke. Or maybe I'll be the one to bring it all crashing down around you."

Kakashi murmured, "Hey, hey, what's all this heavy talk?"

Didn't they just meet two days ago? What the hell was wrong with these two? He had read Sandaime's briefings on them and even with them right in front of him it was difficult to believe that all the data he'd received on them could be true. While he'd normally be ticked at having a girl with Sakura's attitude, at this point, he was god damned relieved to have at least one normal newbie genin. And... when did the Uchiha brat activate his Sharingan? What had triggered its activation? That wasn't in the report, and neither was the extreme killing intent that Uzumaki could project.

This was too weird. He needed to confer with Sandaime again. He wasn't sure he could handle this. What was the Hokage thinking, putting them on one team? It was almost easier to believe that they were chuunin infiltrators from another village that had undergone major body-alterations to impersonate them. He wished he could just have them placed under heavy genjutsu-augmented psycho-interrogation with Ibiki... Would he actually have to take them into the field like this?

At least they probably did not yet have the skill to interpret the true level of his unease.

"And anyway, you two... Hah, I mean, talking about being Hokage and, what, some kind of Grand Kage? You're not even genin yet. At least, not if you don't pass my exam. The failure rate over the years is sixty-six percent, and no one has ever passed my test. You may very well be back at the academy after tomorrow."

That quieted them down, but the disturbingly knowing sparkle in Sasuke's eyes and the half-longing, half-homicidal look in Naruto's was creeping him out in a bad way. He zipped through the rest of it, only telling them where and when to meet him for the survival exam. He even forgot to tell them to skip breakfast in his hurry to get to the Hokage's tower.

There was something deeply wrong.

---end chapter 1


	2. Chapter 2

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 2: War Chest

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

From the way they picked at each other with such carefully honed barbs, Kakashi would have thought that their teamwork would have been, well, awful.

But they passed his exam. And they did it easily.

Naruto would have charged in, but the Uchiha had given him one of those damned odd looks and that had been enough. They hadn't even needed to back off for a few minutes to talk over a goddamn plan.

Sasuke had simply... commanded the other two. With single words and efficient hand signals.

Kakashi would not have been totally surprised for the girl to be moving like a puppet on a string, but he was blown away by how well they coordinated with Naruto. The sheer size of his weapon alone and the amount of clear space it required to swing freely should have made it impossible for them to even fight together with him in close quarters.

Watching them now as they waited for their first mission, seeing Naruto fume quietly while Sakura clutched an indifferent Sasuke's arm, Kakashi had to close his exposed eye and recall how... tight their teamwork was.

Somehow, Sakura had kept moving around Naruto's wild, powerful sword strikes even while employing simple, distracting tactics such as kicking up dust, using basic bunshin and kawarimi to make it tougher to keep track of where she was, and generally being a pest. She was also maintaining a low level genjutsu over Naruto that made his blade blurry and just a little harder to see – which was actually a major advantage for them as the slightest miscalculation regarding the reach and position of that blade could have easily resulted in Kakashi's losing an arm. And all the while, Sasuke was circling around, sharingan activated, waiting patiently for the optimal time to strike, still giving the occasional instruction.

It had been unnerving. Well, that and how close Naruto's blade sometimes got, and the way it blasted completely through trees and boulders and anything else that got in the way as they fought around the training field. It was almost a relief when Sasuke had raced in from an oblique angle in Kakashi's blind spot (on the side with the sharingan eye that he had kept hidden, since, well, it was meant to be a test that it was possible to pass) and made off with the bells.

There was definitely something off about them.

In fact, being with them gave Kakashi a fucking bad headache. If he was just another jounin, he'd just let it go and accept the situation as is, but he was driven to look underneath the underneath, and there were so many layers of underneath in those messed up kids it didn't make sense.

Sandaime hadn't been much help either. A sigh, and mumbling about things being classified and 'need to know.'

Kakashi had known about the Kyuubi of course, and of the disastrous attempt to seal it into Naruto...

He shook his head and, with the ease from the practice that all survivors old enough to remember possessed, banished the horrors of what had come after. That did not matter now, though he wondered if somehow, they affected what Naruto had become.

He had read some of the sketchy reports about Naruto's years outside the village, the training, and the Hunts. But, going over them the second time, it was obvious that the reports had been doctored. No one other than the Hokage, who wasn't telling, seemed to know just what it is that Naruto Hunted, or exactly who trained him. There were subtle genjutsu sealed right into the pages that suggested to the reader 'don't read too close here... you read this word but can't remember it... you've lost your place on this page...' and so forth.

Over the years, Naruto had apparently been paid vast sums of money by various families scattered around the country for Hunts, which were not described except in the murkiest of terms, and this money was in turn paid to rather isolated temples, who would take him in for brief periods of time, ostensibly for training purposes. His work seemed to be by word of mouth only, and after he was done, people eagerly forgot that he had even been there. Kakashi had initially thought that Naruto had done some kind of bounty hunting, but it wasn't that – Naruto's name would have come in for each bounty he took, and that's the sort of thing that gets you into the bingo book and of course he wasn't in there.

It seemed insane, he could not have been Hunting those dark Others from the failure of Yondaime's seal... Naruto was indeed stronger than most genin, but not yet even at the level of a true chuunin, after all.

And Sasuke? His psych evaluation after his clan was slaughtered was openly classified. Nobody knew what the hell he did while he trained in the ruins of the Uchiha complex. No foster family had taken care of him.

No guardian assigned to him had been able to last. Nobody could keep up with him once on the Uchiha grounds – he'd turn one of those shadowy corners and disappear. Jounin had tried to track him in there and failed and that was when he had been a child.

And there were... rumors... surrounding the genius survivor, rumors about the families of non-ninja children he'd been friends with disappearing from the village, never to be seen again. People left the village all the time, after all, any non-academy-graduates were free to come and go, but it seemed that those who were friends of Sasuke always moved away within months of getting to know him well enough to be invited to the Uchiha manor.

Even the girl was not quite as normal as Kakashi had first thought. He could not help going over their performance in his exam over and over.

Sakura acted like a a young, carefree and even shallow teen most of the time, but in combat? She'd been like a machine. Her eyes were dead as dust while she was fighting, like something was missing in there somewhere. Her breathing, her heartbeat, a number of her autonomic functions were tightly controlled and balanced. And the few attacks she made were carefully chosen, and would have been lethal if they had hit – all without the slightest trace of killing intent. That kind of mental compartmentalization wasn't normal, it was like she had dissociative identity disorder... Except in a controlled, measured manner, like her personality operated on a switch.

That didn't just happen to somebody, it had been done to her. By whom?

Kakashi did not want to think about what it could mean if it was Sasuke that had caused her to be this way. He had no proof, nothing but his observations and intuition, things he could feel and connect in his mind but not things he could explain in a linear, logical fashion.

It was sometimes hard for the genius to think like a normal person – even the Hokage did not always pick up all the hints and aspects of the things Kakashi said. He was so used to thinking on multiple levels he often forgot it – he spoke a language that was layered up from body language to tonalities of his vocals to inflection to the subtle selection of words which could themselves mean multiple things, and most people only picked up the top layer.

It's not that Kakashi tried to be obtuse – he thought he spoke clearly and frankly all the time, the problem was with everyone else. Oddly enough, it was Gai who got what Kakashi was saying most of time. When Gai exclaimed that Kakashi was "being hip" - that's exactly what he was trying to do. After all, only the tights-attired maniac could understood body language well enough to spar with Kakashi while only looking at his feet. Though Kakashi did have to wonder why, for someone who picked up the underneath so well, Gai had to be so over the top all the time. It was as though Gai had close to the same interpretative faculties as Kakashi but was saddled with problems in expressing himself. Once again, Kakashi found a few threads of his complex mind running in circles about whether or not Gai had some variant of what had once been called Tourette syndrome.

But around this team, Kakashi felt... slow. There was a lot that passed between the three genin which he could detect but could not at all decipher. The surface stuff was easy, but underneath, it was like they had been together for years and had their own private under-language.

He was very much the outsider and hated being the one to not understand. He bet that Gai would be ecstatic to have these kids.

Instead, Kakashi was the one obsessively following them around, taking notes about details that would seem irrelevant to lesser minds during the times he could not spare the chakra to record their behavior with the sharingan.

---

"Weeding a what? The fuck. Why hire ninja to do the fucking gardening?" Naruto exclaimed. "Regular school children can do fucking gardening. This genin business is shit. I did more for more money on my own outside the village."

"Officially, you're now a Leaf genin, Naruto. You can't moonlight. We're supposed to take this time to build teamwork," Sasuke said, sensibly, "and train."

"Yeah, stop boasting Naruto!"

"...What's that you said, girl? Was somebody talking to you?"

Gently, Sasuke redirected her punch. And the next one. "No, Sakura. Don't touch him. You'll get hurt."

"Okay, Sasuke-kun. Anything you say." Sakura was giddy just to feel the contact of his hands, even for a moment. She wondered if Sasuke would keep deflecting her attacks on Naruto? Best not to try, she didn't want to bother him too much. That had been Ino's mistake, among others, and Sakura did her best to be what Sasuke wanted.

Naruto kicked at a pebble as they ambled along. It rocketed forward, fragmenting against a metal fencepost.

"Girlie boy, I can't believe how docile you are about fucking gardening. Fighting, that's who I am."

And though he would not admit it, his current limited nature did disappoint him, actually.

In those other memories, there were visions of himself when he had been whole, and he knew he should not have been so one-dimensional. In that other life, he had only approached mastery of his fighting craft when he had realized that there was more to the sword than destruction. It seemed strange, but his swordwork only began to be truly powerful when he learned of peace. Watching the old man hammer at the sword, entranced by the sparks, feeling the spray of the waterfall as he waited for the logs to crash down upon him. But those memories were more distant the others, and there was just so much anger and hatred and despair...

Naruto wondered if he would ever be able to gain that completeness, that quietness of mind, despite carrying the pain of everything that came afterwards, the blood, the screaming, chopping off his own hand to try to protect something more important than his own life, everything.

When Sasuke let out a breath to speak, Naruto nearly tripped. He listened to Sasuke, and as usual, felt that mixture of sadness and anger. "My right hand, there is a procedure for all things. All plans are composed of sub-plans, composed of single steps that sometimes have to occur in sequence. When the time comes, you know you will be glad for these days."

Naruto scowled blackly. "Stop calling me that, Uchiha." And then he could feel a surprising amount of... it wasn't killer intent, but it was something, coming off of the girl. "And you, groupie, stop that."

She sighed, and did so. It was not her place to choose for Sasuke his tools. She was only one of his tools herself, and wasn't that all she had ever wanted? But she couldn't help it. That big bully and his ridiculous sword, just looking at him made her want to take him down a notch. He hadn't had to do anything to earn Sasuke's trust.

She wondered how she would do if she went all out against Naruto, for real? Sasuke had taught her a lot, and he'd told her that she was better than himself already in some aspects but... Sasuke hurt his hand fighting Naruto, and she did not have the sharingan to help her predict his moves. And one mistake against that sword, even in light sparring, would result in her getting maimed. Is that why he wanted this barbarian? That raw strength?

Just as they arrived at the client's location, Sasuke seemed to recall something, and turned about, planting himself directly in front of Naruto.

"What?"

"Naruto," Sasuke growled, looking down his nose at the other despite being a lot shorter. "Do NOT use your sword techniques on the weeds. You'll destroy the landscape."

"Oh come on. Like I would."

"You were thinking it. Don't."

"Oh come on - "

"Just don't. We have to establish a reputation for professionalism, alright? If people ask for our team specifically, we get missions more quickly and can get the better missions faster. Not to speak of getting more money if we do the jobs properly."

"Bah. You are the last Uchiha. You have more money than maybe a fifth of the operational budget of Konoha's ninja operations. What do you care about money?"

"Barbarian. To unify all the Hidden Villages will take a vast war chest, with resources measured not just in terms of money and... Why am I bothering?" Sasuke sighed. "Just do as I say and you'll get to swing that monster at real enemies again sooner instead of later."

Kakashi shook his head, resisting the urge to chew on one end of his pencil. He was hanging off one side of a nearby building, observing them. What was that look on Naruto's face just then? His face had twisted, an expression that could mean a lot of things or nothing, but the way that Sakura's face had almost mirrored his just then suggested more rather than less. Briefly, they had looked like the normal kids they were supposed to be. But their words... they sounded like old soldiers that had been through too much together.

The jounin decided to take a break and go fight Gai so he could stop thinking for a while. Gai was always good for that.

---

In between the numerous, mind-numbing D missions that they took, they trained together. Sasuke insisted upon it. He would not allow either of them to skip group training.

And this time, he took it upon himself to arrange a joint training sessions with another genin team.

"The team with the damned dog boy. Why did you have to have us do this junk with the team of that fool? Groupie girl here is more useful than fricking dog boy..."

"...The time will come when we will need to be able to work with all these other teams, and more. A war is not won by individuals, or even by small teams. It is won by the proper allocation and dynamic use of a vast hierarchy of operational field, support, intelligence and logistical units."

"...The fuck you saying?" Even in his other life, as a commander for whom men had lived and died, he had not thought of combat on that level.

His memories of what leadership had been like all involved practical things he had learned in the field. The other him had not had the patience to learn the theory beneath until close to the end, before the betrayal. After... his dreams were full of those hellish fragments of memory, the constant running, the desperate battles, the suffering, the perpetual state of exhaustion from being unable to sleep, the ambushes, the dying. Being so close to her, and yet so far...

Naruto shook his head, aware of the curious way they were both looking at him. He muttered, "I don't need nobody."

"..."

"Naruto!" Sakura yelled. "Can't you stop complaining and cussing for one day? Even your muscle-obsessed meat head should be happy about all these chances to improve your strength! It's not like you can get any stronger just practicing by yourself swinging that hunk of metal!" Her hand twitched like she wanted to smack him, but by the end of the first month she had seen plenty of evidence of his paranoid, hair-trigger responses and did not fancy getting injured.

Sakura was definitely glad that Sasuke had kept her from trying to get any cheap hits on Naruto. The wild boy did not take close contact with others well, or even the presence of others in his personal space. At all. The few times she had brushed by him, shoulder to shoulder when navigating tight spaces or touched fingers when handing objects to each other for various carpentry missions, he had tensed up so tight she did not need to look at him to know he already had a hand on his sword, actually needing to exert himself to not perform a draw-strike.

What was his problem anyway? Well, in addition to all the other ones? He really could not stand being touched. Sakura considered him to be most like an animal at those times, like a wild thing that could not be tamed.

She supposed it ought to be useful when they finally got to do missions in hostile territory, but she really could see why Sasuke insisted on him attending these group training days... Naruto needed to get used to working with others for decent lengths of time or he would slip and injure somebody on his own team sooner or later.

Her thoughts rapidly cycled through their missions. Secretly, she recalled almost cheering when an extremely annoying cat they had been contracted to find in the park had jumped out of an unexpected hiding place among some tree roots, spooking Naruto into letting fly with one of those blindingly fast slashes. He had managed to stop himself in time to avoid splatting the little beast, but the rush of air pressure from the huge blade's motion had actually tossed the cat into the nearby pond. The yowls of protest it had let loose made all the other crap that day worth it.

When they got there, Sasuke asked the other team for suggestions for the day's exercises, and studiously ignored Naruto's antisocial comments in general and digs at Kiba specifically. They eventually decided on a tracking and light combat exercise.

The six genin split into three pairs composed of one from each team. They would take turns hiding, searching for and chasing each other through one of the few chuunin training courses that were open to genin. Each time one pair encountered another, the designated hunter team had to be able to detain the other pair for at least 5 minutes in order for them to 'win' the encounter. An escape team 'won,' if it was never found, or if it managed to keep disengaging from battle under 5 minutes and keep it up until they got out of 'the mission zone.' That way, one person from the more combat oriented team 7 would have an opportunity to pick up tracking and stealth skills from their partner from team 8 and the team 8 partner could pick up some combat tricks during encounters with other pairs. They would also rotate through the pairings to try to distribute skills and learn more about each other.

It was a little rough at first as some pairings were... sub-optimal. Kiba more or less dismissed Sakura's usefulness in combat until she'd demonstrated how easy it was to beat someone up if genjutsu made one difficult to see. And Hinata was at first too timid to actually suggest anything to Sasuke – he had actually needed to hypnotize her slightly, using sharingan-enhanced genjutsu, in order to get her to get her to believe he wanted to learn something from her.

Surprisingly, Shino and Naruto worked together the best. On the hunter end, they got the drop on the others most of the time, and both had ways to make it tough to get enough distance to flee. And on the escape end, they managed to make it about half the time. The combination of swarms of bugs and Naruto's all-out aggressive attack style simply worked well, and did not impede each other much. "Enh, don't look so aggrieved, groupie girl. Bug boy and I work well because our verbal communication skills both suck, so we're used to getting by on other cues."

Otherwise, Naruto did not work well with either Kiba or Hinata, and either got caught or failed to catch the others repeatedly in those pairings. Kiba acted like a whipped dog around him and Hinata obviously did not like his angry, mean personality.

Sasuke's skill set was decent in both roles, though him and Kiba were far better at the hunt than the escape and him being with Hinata was better on the escape than the hunt. Working with Shino was more difficult as Sasuke could not cut loose with many of his techniques as much since the bugs could easily get caught up in them.

Sakura was best on the escape because of her genjutsu and tool use, and her pairings reflected it. She could balance out Kiba so that they were decent in both roles, while being with Hinata reinforced the ability to escape and reduced it on the hunt because they could not detain other pairs long enough. Like Sasuke, she found working with Shino to be a trying experience, and her performance with the bug specialist was mediocre as well.

At the end of the day, all were tired, dirty, and satisfied. Naruto was pleased enough with the tricks he had learned to watch out for that he did not object too much when Sasuke declared that they would have dinner together after each went home to quickly shower and change.

"It's important to build a bond with those who might one day save your life," he intoned gravely. "Cohesiveness too is a resource, and more precious than the money it takes to arm, supply and maintain a fighting force."

"Umm," Hinata said softly. "We've been at peace for a while though, since the demon invasion those years back. Why do you keep thinking in terms of wars between the villages, Sasuke-kun?"

Sasuke chuckled. "All the villages are still at war, you know, despite what they tell the civilians and us poor genin. It's a silent war right now, still at the stage of small encounters and spying and kidnapping, threats and treaties and maneuvering behind the scenes. But if you recall from our history classes, every ninja village on the continent has gotten into a major battle between five and ten times over the last hundred years. It is as though we've been at war all this time, you see? Just on a longer scale. You can see the cycle just by looking at the years by the names carved into the monument. People die in large numbers in spurts – it is still a time of great chaos, and it will be until someone strong enough to enforce order rises and changes the system. You know there are a lot of missing-nin out there and..."

Sasuke trailed off. Only Hinata was still listening, and he could tell it was only out of courtesy. Sakura was blissfully passed out, leaning heavily against him, and Naruto and Kiba were apparently having an argument about who ordered the better tasting dish of food (at least, Sasuke thought, Kiba had managed to regain some of his spirit in Naruto's presence). Shino was, well, he was not physically moving, but Sasuke could see the guy's plate of barbecue slowly emptying - he was probably maintaining a genjutsu to hide the... eating habits... of his swarm of insects.

Around them, the Uchiha looked at the others dining in the restaurant. He saw genin like himself, numerous chuunin, a handful of jounin, and one or two academy students with their families. And of course, the civilians too, who composed fully half of the customers that night.

"I'm interested, really I am," Hinata murmured softly.

Sasuke smiled, adjusted the tall collar of his deep blue shirt. "Hyuuga Hinata, remember what your eyes have seen today. It may not seem like much of a start, but this is the beginning of real change, a change Naruto and I will make happen. Then you shall see the difference between what we have now, and a true peace."

"Mm. Um, why is Naruto important? He just seems like another combat-crazy type."

"Naruto is the most important resource in my war chest. You, the others, everyone in this village, everyone on this continent will see why, one day."

Out of their line of sight, and right in Hinata's blind spot (not that she had the byakugan activated), Kakashi's eyes narrowed. Sasuke knew about Naruto's link to the Yondaime's death. He had to. What else could he be talking about?

Had some relative of his defied the Hokage's law and told him before the massacre had occurred? Or did he have access to reports that belonged to the Uchiha clan alone, hidden somewhere that the search teams had not gotten to after the Uchiha were destroyed?

---end chapter 2


	3. Chapter 3

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 3: demons and Demons

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

As it happened, Tazuna did not complain much about his escort-to-be. Sure they were kids... but they were... well, it was difficult for him to admit it to himself, but these genin were just as intimidating as he had hoped to be able to get, and more.

The two boys were strange, were not like any teenage boys he had ever met before. The facial expressions, the words, the set of the shoulders - they radiated cool professionalism, as though they had done this a hundred times before. There was none of the posturing he had expected from having to hire kids.

The leader was obviously the one with the nice hair. He spoke quietly with a certain gravity. It would be so easy to believe in that kid's words - "We will keep you safe, sir."

The girl with hair not quite as perfectly managed was the most normal - she still had to exert effort to seem professional. She had some fire underneath, had twitched noticeably when he had tried to get a rise out of them by mumbling, "Are these kids all that my village's money can pay for?"

The other boy, the one with the worst hair... Tazuna could tell that the leader tried to keep this one on a leash. Tazuna had initially thought, from his oversized sword and his physically impressive size, that this boy would have been brash, overconfident, and arrogant. And he was. Except that underneath was not some insecure boy pretending to be a man, underneath, there was a simmering, explosive fury. Obviously, if this one had not been made into a ninja, he would have turned into a homicidal maniac. In response to the bridge-builder's comment, well, there had not been one, as though Tazuna was totally beneath him.

Tazuna caught a few muttered words from that scruffy one - "...just hope I get to fight somebody strong..."

"Don't worry, Tazuna-san. They may not look like much, but this is one of our best genin teams. They have actually completed too many low level missions – at this pace they will make it difficult to allocate any to the other newer teams - this is why they have been given this mission."

Not look like much? The Hokage must have been joking. These kids were terrifying. He hoped none of his children would ever get it into their heads to become ninja. Their childhood had been stripped away from them. Well, maybe the girl was still sort of innocent looking, but how long would that last around those two?

"They'll do, I guess," he said gruffly.

The (apparently) one-eyed jounin said, "Well, see you tomorrow morning then, Tazuna-san. You can go ahead. I'll just discuss some preparations with my team regarding the route and the schedule."

"Eh? It's a simple, straight line to - "

"Tazuna-san," the well-groomed boy interjected, "since you are hiring us as an escort, there are presumably threats to escort you from. We will not be taking the straight route, and we will be studying the map for areas where it will be safest to stop, and also the areas we are most likely to get attacked."

That alarmed the bridge-builder. If they suspected, they'd bump up the mission classification, and the fees would...

"Purely as an educational experience, sir," the boy said, voice rising somewhat, the skin around his eyes twitching with the slightest hint of a smile. "We like to take everything as a chance to train. And I personally will brush up on my knowledge of the... economics... of Wave. In preparation for... what others would not prepare for."

"Ah. O...K then. Well. See you tomorrow." The kid knew! He knew that Tazuna had been lying about the circumstances of the mission. And he was playing along.

As he closed the door behind him, Tazuna had to restrain himself from grinning. He had thought it to be a long shot, a probable waste of money, but despite their youth and the slacker attitude of their jounin, Tazuna had a feeling, a growing confidence that Gatou would be in for quite the surprise if he followed through on those threats. He had that sense in his gut, the same one that he relied on when setting up contracts and hiring staff - these guys, they were a fucking bargain. Even if they scared him.

---

"Sasuke-kun, that was really cool. Kakashi-san looked so shocked when you asked for the better maps, the ones that showed the topology," Sakura smiled, gleefully taking the opportunity to hold Sasuke's hand while he was thinking too intently to notice.

"Mm. Naruto, you saw it, right?"

"Girlie boy, must we have a team dinner now after all those hours staring at maps? You know I can't stand to be around you."

Sakura shook her head. "Uzumaki, you can't stand to be around anybody. I think that's why Sasuke-kun likes you so much. That and your freakish sword and strength."

"Ah, Sakura, Sakura..." Sasuke sighed, noticed their linked hands, shook hers off. Not in a mean way or anything - it did not hurt her feelings. That was just him. "You remind me so of someone I used to know. That's why I tolerated you at first, until you demonstrated your usefulness. But Naruto here..." and he paused, a slight half-smile on his lips, "It is as if he is exactly someone I used to know."

"...If you really understood what you were saying, Uchiha, you'd know that I'd kill you if those words were true," Naruto muttered.

They were doing it again, Sakura thought sadly. There was an undercurrent between them that went so deep. Hell yeah she was jealous. At least she knew for sure that Sasuke wasn't gay... Mm, those were pleasant, if surprising memories. She settled herself and tried to just enjoy the feeling of walking next to him, under a cool, clear evening sky. She did not really want to understand what it was about anyway - once they got started like that, it was best to just let Naruto get it out of his system.

"Naruto," Sasuke stretched his arms up and out as he spoke, which released a series of popping sounds out all along his spine and neck, "I don't know all that much about you, it's true, but you've been out there, you wandered for years, even as a child. Can you honestly say that continuing that way would have led you to find what you are looking for? I know you won't kill me no matter what you think. Because I have a use for you, and a dream that is bigger than us. And you haven't been able to find such a dream on your own."

It had to be him, Naruto thought. So why did he feel so empty? Vengeance was at hand. As confirmed by their training together, it was he, the ungraceful, brute force barbarian, who had the edge in experience and training, this time, in this life. This time, he was not a talented but unrefined kid who had needed to make up and teach himself his own sword style based on an ungainly and difficult weapon facing a master swordsman...

He could kill Sasuke. He knew it. In the here and now, he was already stronger. In the worst case, even if luck turned against him, they would both die in a simultaneous kill - which would suit Naruto just fine.

So why didn't he?

There was a lump in his throat he could not choke down.

"I can't read your mind, Naruto. But whatever it is you suspect about me, even if it was all true, don't you want this dream I will give you? A cause worth fighting for, if you choose it. And it is your choice. A hawk can't fly leashed to another. But, choose to fly with me, and maybe from that height, you'll be able to see what you've always been looking for."

It was both better, and worse, than how it had been in the dreams of that other life.

Naruto touched the spot on his neck, the cursed brand that still bled whenever his control was not tight enough.

"Eeeww, Sasuke-kuun, you can't! I'm the one you'll be flying with!" Sakura could not quite let that one go by without protest.

Sasuke laughed. "Sakura, I plan to take this whole village with me, where I'm going. A new golden age. You and Naruto will be at my left hand and my right, and we will make it happen."

Naruto murmured, "Let's just say I won't kill you yet, Uchiha. But I won't be sacrificed like a pawn, not for any ideal."

"Naruto, in this world of martial skills and strategy mated to ninja magic, I intend for us to become so powerful that I can reach for this goal openly, without subterfuge, without backroom deals and betrayals. Loyalty is more important than any power that another can give. We will not trade for power - we will take it."

Incredible! The man, if it was him behind that too-handsome face, was actually more conceited this time than the last! It could only be him. But... grudgingly, Naruto had to admit that the sharingan was quite an asset, something there had been no equivalent to in that other life.

Even his own gift from that other life, his swordsmanship, based around a simple, brutal style, was enhanced in this world to an incredible degree by ninja techniques. And his inherent toughness and strength too, were much greater. And too... there was the brand.

The brand worked very differently here.

"It is you, isn't it?"

"Naruto," Sasuke said, smile fading, "I don't know who you're looking for, but why get caught up in old memories? Let's get strong and drag this place, kicking and screaming, into a better future. A hundred years of war, and I know how we can end it."

Damn that Uchiha. Was he or wasn't he?

Could he let go? If he thought about it too hard, he knew it would just give him a headache. Was he a man reborn into another life, or a kid dreaming dreams of someone else? Did the mistakes of a past life carry over, was destiny really set? He had thought at first, from the presence of the brand... but who was he if he was not a man defined by his past life?

Too much thinking.

"Let's spar, Uchiha. You and the girl against me."

Fighting was simple and uncomplicated and beautiful. He did not have to worry about what was real when the sword was in his hand and chakra thrummed through his flesh.

"Naruto!" Sakura was relieved that the spell between them was over, but ticked at the thought of getting tired and sweaty the night before their first big mission. She got a grip on herself. Her yelling just made Naruto even more obstinate - it actually seemed to amuse him. "Come on. Tomorrow, you'll maybe even get to kill somebody, okay? Let's just have dinner and part ways tonight. We'll be sick of each other by the time the mission is done."

Naruto sighed. "I'm not about killing, you know. I just like to fight. There's nothing more pure than fighting. Bah. You two have dinner, I'm not. I'm not hungry."

His legs coiled beneath him, uncoiled, sending him high up to the rooftops.

Sakura's brows rose. "Sasuke-kun, you're letting him go?"

"Tomorrow's the real thing. It's all been games and practice until now, but tonight, Naruto has to decide whether or not he will swing his sword for a dream, or if he'll run away, and go back to a lonely, thankless search for more darkness to destroy."

She really wanted to ask it, but she was afraid. Asking Sasuke questions was tough. He was so open tonight though, she wondered if she would ever have another chance.

Sakura settled for something that did not risk her self-esteem. Within herself, she was upset at the hold her fear had on her. "What did Naruto do while he was outside Konoha? How do you know? I think part of what bugs Kakashi-sensei about us is that he doesn't know what's the deal with Naruto either."

"...I have my own sources. If you want to know, you should ask him. There are terrible things out there, Sakura. Things nobody wants to believe exist. I think Naruto spent years looking for those things, hoping that one of them would be the one."

"The one he wants revenge on?"

"...The one that can kill him."

---

After twenty minutes of waiting, Kakashi had been on the verge of leaving him behind. But of course Sasuke would not allow that, and it burned Naruto somewhat to see in the other's face that the Uchiha had not had the slightest doubt that he would be there.

Otherwise, the first several hours were rather... boring.

They strode along paths that Tazuna had never heard of before. The trails they took were crooked and little-used, some almost not recognizable as trails at all, tree roots encroaching, eroded away here and there.

"Hey, is this okay? Have these kids gotten us lost?"

Kakashi sighed. The tenth time that morning!

"While I would not have taken this much trouble to plan a c-ranked mission, I did oversee their discussions and I am familiar with this route, Tazuna-san. It's longer and it's... a little tougher on the feet. But it is also indisputably safer. We are actually somewhat ahead of schedule, considering how uneven the ground is. We will get back on the main route in a few days, just before we reach the ferry."

They camped that night in a little cave at the foot of a hill. The entrance was small enough to require Tazuna, Kakashi and Naruto to stoop low, but it was actually still somewhat comfortable inside.

"There's a firepit in here. And the ceiling of the cave is braced with wooden beams. How did you kids find out about this place?"

Sakura grinned. "It's not on any of the maps, but some of the old geological surveys are still in our archives. I, uh, spent a couple of extra hours last night going over them."

"I'll hunt."

"Naruto, there's no need. We've brought enough supplies to - "

"I'm sure packs of dry biscuits, jerky, fruits and nuts are enough for a pansy like you, Uchiha, but I need fresh meat and a lot of it."

"...Just, ah, gut your kill before bringing it in. No need to offend our client's sensitivities."

"Whatever."

He stalked out into the evening, tread surprisingly light.

Kakashi cleared his throat. "Look, Sasuke-kun, initiative is a virtue and all that but I would appreciate it if you three at least pretended to consult me before deciding on things."

Sasuke shrugged. "If you wish it, Kakashi-sensei, we can consult you on vital matters every time they come up, such as which foot to put forward first when we take a step, and whether or not our vector from moment to moment is optimal, factoring in the wind, elevation, the client's tiredness, the safety of the mission, and the timing. When Uzumaki comes back in an hour, would you care to specify the precise measurements of the salt and pepper with which he will spice the boar meat?"

The jounin sighed. "You little brats are really far too independent. How do you know Naruto will be bringing in a boar?"

Sakura perked up and turned to their corner of the cave, "Sasuke-kun also had me check the wildlife records in the survival section pertaining to our route so we'd know what to look out for."

"That and Naruto noticed spoor and marks close to the trees, overturned earth suggesting rooting behavior," Sasuke added. "It won't take him long to find their tracks, kill one, gut it and carry it back."

Kakashi arched a brow. "When did he tell you that?"

"...I saw his nostrils flare, and noticed what he was looking at about twenty minutes before we got to the cave."

Internally, Kakashi winced at the questioning expression on Sasuke's face – it rather eloquently said, without a word verbalized: I expected better observational skills from a genius jounin.

It was difficult hiking along their route while keeping a book in front of his face and reading, while maintaining his awareness of their surroundings. He didn't have to justify himself to his genin team damn it! He needed to plan out something to take his team down a notch – they were entirely too confident. While he was brooding, Sasuke ignored him totally when he sent Sakura out to gather a suitable amount of firewood.

Kakashi's mood did not improve when Naruto returned some time later, only moments after the girl's return, carrying about fifty pounds of boar meat cuts on long wooden spits across his shoulders.

"You actually brought one down with that thing you call a sword?" Sakura asked.

"Of course not!" the dark-haired young man exclaimed, indignant. "My weapons are for killing! I need no weapon to bring down an animal."

That made Tazuna blink. "So what did you kill it with? And... why bring down such a large animal? We'll be back in my town long before we finish eating all that! Not to speak of all the meat wasted that you left behind."

Naruto laughed. "Little man, I killed it with my bare hands. And what you don't finish, whatever, leave it to the forest and it will not go to waste – there are wolves out there close by, and one or two bears, and a number of lesser creatures like foxes that wouldn't mind easy leftovers. Nothing goes to waste out here. And as for what I left behind," his toothy smile turned dark, "I didn't leave anything behind. What I didn't bring, I consumed."

"You ate over a hundred pounds of boar meat? By yourself?"

Sasuke interrupted, "He did not say he ate it. He said he consumed it. Don't ask, Tazuna-san. I have seen Naruto's techniques... You don't want to know more than you have to."

That pricked Kakashi's curiosity so badly he almost asked, but it would not do to take such obvious bait. He merely sighed again, and when the meat was adequately browned, fat sizzling off it and dripping into the fire, he did not refuse what was offered.

---

They encountered the Demon of the Mist upon returning to the main route.

"This guy is on another level, he says!" Naruto said in disgust. "Then he gets himself caught in a fucking stupid ball of water. And worst, he asks us to run? Damn, you SUCK, Kakashi!"

"Naruto, he's a high-level - "

"You shut it, girly man. You too groupie. The two of you take out the water clones and guard the old man. This is MY kind of battle."

As Naruto drew his sword, Zabusa let loose an admiring whistle.

"Just because you have a big sword doesn't make you a match for me, little boy," Zabusa said, clearly amused. "I - "

Naruto roared, "If you got time to talk then you got time to FIGHT!"

His sudden burst of speed brought him in close. And it was on.

In the first moments of Naruto's mad charge, Kakashi was freed. Naruto's sword shrieked as it arced through the air, relentless strikes that forced Zabusa back into the water.

For all Zabusa's greater size and his belief in his superior skill and experience, he could tell from the mass of the blade and the ease with which Naruto handled it that there was a lot of power in those strikes. And he could respect power. While Zabusa's blade was better crafted, being both well-balanced and light for its size while maintaining a razor edge, well... it was a rare experience for Zabusa to be the one in a duel who had to fight with finesse.

Kakashi would have interfered, fingers poised to commence a long string of seals for a major technique, but then Sasuke was there, a hand on his shoulder. Sakura too, stood by them, and watched the duel, not with alarm or fear for her team-mate, but with a crazy, confident grin.

Had he really considered teaching his genin the tree-climbing exercise soon? All three of them could already walk on water! Perhaps he should not have been so surprised, however – he considered the way Naruto fought with his sword – it should have been obvious that the big genin used chakra to maintain his footing despite the momentum of his heavy blade. And with Sasuke's penchant for excessive training, and their training in teams... How often did they train when Kakashi could not keep an eye on them?

Sasuke tugged at his shoulder again.

"Don't, Kakashi-sensei. Naruto is best when facing someone stronger than him."

"He's just a genin. He'll get himself killed."

"Give him a chance, sensei. While Zabusa is a superior assassin of great experience, and is surely a better ninja overall than Naruto, who is admittedly just a genin, well... Naruto is a genin that has put his whole life into that sword and techniques built around it. If he can keep it close, keep the pressure up so that Zabusa has no time for a jutsu, Naruto's overwhelming offense can carry him through."

"He's just not fast enough!" But Kakashi did pause, did force himself to wait and see, though all the while, he expected Naruto to overextend, leaving himself open for a killing counter-stroke.

Charging upon the water, spray kicked up when their blades passed too close to the surface, the two swordsman were engaged in a dance of shining death. They were blurs on the water, with Naruto always charging, each strike ending cleanly in perfect guard positions that allowed him to follow up with succeeding sword strikes.

Zabusa was elated. Outside of the Mist, he so rarely encountered ninja that were skilled with the sword, and never swords comparable in size to his own. Comparable! This little gaki's sword was bigger than his own! It took all his skill, and his greater speed, to carefully deflect the heavier blade with the flat of his own sword. Oh yes, it was tempting to cross blades directly with this boy, to directly match edge on edge and see which sword could destroy the other, his better tempered, sharper blade, or the brat's massive triple-weight monster, but that was not exactly smart, and Zabusa was, if anything, a survivor.

"You're far better than your age suggests. Are you the genius of some clan? Hah, and those vicious eyes of yours! You remind me of myself. You're only a little slower!" And better and better, Zabusa's words while they fought seemed to make the boy angrier and angrier without causing his skill to decline. Amusing. The boy just kept snarling and roaring, like a beast, but there was nothing beast-like about the controlled, powerful sequence of strikes and guard-stances, the smooth grace of his footwork.

He recognized these moves. Each strike also closed off a line of attack while counter striking. Simultaneous defense and offense – an efficient style when using a large blade against an unarmored opponent. Yes, the distinct Vor and Nach, and breaking a guard and regaining initiative. The way the boy read his own moves by the feel of his parries against the flat of the other sword. That triangle step. Strike of Wrath. Crooked Strike. Crosswise Strike. Squinting Strike. Crown Strike. And in different patterns, alternating, feinting, attempts to bind his sword.

Zabusa measured him well, and when he saw his opportunity, he took it. He released the chakra in his feet for just an instant, sinking down to his waist to avoid a horizontal slash that whispered just above the hairs of his head, then charged chakra downward, leaping back to the surface and bringing his sword arcing upward in a reverse cut. The modified Crooked Strike knocked the boy back a few feet, sent him skipping along the surface of the water another ten feet. The cut hadn't felt right though, and he could tell that, despite being torn open, the boy's armored vest had protected him from all but the force of the impact.

The Demon of the Mist shook his head. "And fighting at that speed while wearing armor no less. I take it back – with the weight of that over-heavy sword and with your armor, why, without them you would probably match me in speed. It is a pity I must kill you now. Well, out of respect for your technique, I will kill you by the edge rather than by water."

"You're still talking," Naruto said, crouched on the water, sword out to one side. "But you haven't hurt me yet." That was a lie though – he could feel the deep bruises along his side from that stroke, and the slight extra strain on his muscles there would slow him down for strikes going right to left, and would make a number of guard positions more painful. If not for the surge of chakra he had channeled into his now ruined vest, the force of the blow would have shattered his ribs even if he had been protected from the cut.

"You are good, gaki. I have not seen such perfect execution of the ancient style of the five Master Cuts since leaving the Mist. Humor me, boy, do you know the original names of the Master Cuts?"

Naruto smiled, a genuine smile. He shook his head ruefully. So some of the arts from his previous life had somehow survived in this strange world!

The young man breathed out reverentially, "The Verbogen Haue... Zornhau, Krumphau, Zwerchhau, Scheitelhau, and Schielhau. Someone else recognizes them! Nobody in Konoha does. I must visit the Hidden Mist some day."

Zabusa laughed. Oh this was too delightful. "And you can even pronounce the secret cuts properly! But you won't have the chance to go there, gaki. You should be able to tell by know that you cannot beat me with the Meisterhauwen. I know the style too, and with my slight speed advantage, and your heavier blade, you will slow down before I will, and the first fatal cut will be mine. It is inevitable."

Back on the shore, Sakura gawked openly. "What's with Naruto? Why'd they pause? What are they talking about?"

Kakashi was astonished at how much younger Naruto suddenly looked as all the anger left his face. His hearing was good, but the water distorted the sounds somewhat, and he only made out some of their words. "They're talking about sword skills. I wish I knew where Naruto learned his. I'd better stop this – Naruto's lost his momentum, and Zabusa has him figured out."

Sasuke said, "Don't count him out, sensei. He'll surprise you."

Tired, wet, and more than a little frustrated and irritated, Kakashi snapped at Sasuke, "You're so supremely confident in him to the point of risking his life? That's the Demon of the Mist! When he was an academy student he killed everyone else to graduate! He's been killing for longer than Naruto's been alive!"

The soft smile on Sasuke's face was such a puzzler that Kakashi's anger faded.

"A leader must always know the capabilities of his men," Sasuke said, almost tenderly, "and must be able to measure the situation, and know when circumstances will push them to be better than themselves."

"Or to break and die, Sasuke?" Kakashi whispered. What made the Uchiha survivor so sure?

Back on the water, Naruto stood straight, pointed his sword at Zabusa. His smile caught the light of the sun. Zabusa's earlier mist technique had long faded.

"You're right. I can't beat you while both of us are using the mastercuts. Or at least, Zabusa-san, I can't beat you while I'm using the mastercuts, without proper armor. So it seems that you have beaten me. Still, I will kill you."

Zabusa's eyes widened. The boy had bitten his left thumb, smeared it on his neck, and begun a short sequence of one-handed seals.

"Kuchiyose no Jutsu!" Naruto roared. Black tendrils of chakra twisted around his form. Tainted chakra dripped from a seal on his neck that glowed blood red before its light was obscured by the black chakra.

The flare of killer intent surprised him, and then it was growing so fast it paralyzed him for several long moments.

The dark chakra coalesced into armor. Elaborate, articulated steel plate armor covered Naruto from head to toe. Black armor, the surface fluted in ways that confused the eye, geometries that seemed somehow wrong, disturbing to the human mind. Here and there, spikes broke the man-shaped outline, made his proportions seem wrong, seem not quite human. And the helm bore the face of what could only be described as a demon, jagged teeth protruding from the visor which was... fox-shaped? Wolf-shaped? It radiated that evil taint, and the boy seemed to be a foot taller, seemed to be huge, a bonfire of raging killer intent with more chakra than multiple elite jounin. Even that damned sword seemed bigger.

Zabusa could see nothing of the boy in there, could not see his eyes through the shadows of the visor, could see nothing but the shape of a beast in a shell of black steel. Just the pulses of chakra radiating from it disturbed the surface of the lake, made it difficult for the former Mist ninja to stay on his feet.

"Zabusa-san," the voice coming from the helm was distorted, darker, deeper, older. Savage. It sounded like a growl with words in it. "Can you tell me, what does it mean for something to be inevitable?"

---end part 3

Extra disclaimer:

The fighting style described is the set of five strikes refered to as the Meisterhauwen by fencing master Joachim Meyer in his Thorough Descriptions of the Knightly Art of Fencing. Published in 1570, a section describes techniques developed by German swordmasters specifically for the use of a long sword against unarmored opponents (in real life). As Zabusa uses what is essentially an extra broad version of a straight-edged two-handed sword, I've taken the liberty of giving the Hidden Mist a heritage in 'ancient' western sword styles, and it also seems quite appropriate as Gatts' primary fighting style. There is no way that Zabusa's sword could be handled like a katana or even a nodachi - from its dimensions, it has to be used the way medieval and renaissance swordmasters from the West would have used it.

(Incidentally, I've seen some translations spell the name of the main character of Berserk as Gutts, which sounds fricking stupid to me - not that it matters since I may very well never directly refer to the names of those in the Berserk universe that might have been reborn into Naruto's world).

My source for the Meisterhau is the ARMA site. The whole collection of essays on the ARMA website should be considered required reading for anyone wanting to write about fight scenes involving melee weapons. It's quite educational, and puts an interesting spin on how Western fighting arts were hardly inferior to Eastern equivalents.


	4. Chapter 4

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 4: Bloody Snow

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

"I'll show you inevitable," rumbled Naruto.

Articulated steel plate! The Demon of the Mist tightened his grip hard enough to set the the muscles along his wrists and forearms starkly defined under the skin. At the time they were developed, the Master Cuts were useless against that ancient style of armoring as the style was based primarily on slashing techniques. But they had no concept of the body's energies back then...

Would enhancing his strength with chakra give his blade enough momentum? He would have to take a risk, and pray that his sword and body could take the stress of what he was about to try.

Zabusa put all his chakra into his legs, blurred forward, weapon held out to the right. He angled the point down and outwards and raised the hilt two-handed, receiving Naruto's crosswise slash with the flat almost directly opposed to Naruto's edge, taking the strike close to the hilt – Zabusa's blade vibrated with the impact, causing the blade to flex alarmingly, but he managed to hold on and the weapon retained its shape rather than failing. Barely! Zabusa's fingers and wrists ached from the shock.

The ringing of steel echoed across the water, two pure tones, the higher-pitched chime of Zabusa's harder steel, and the deeper sound of Naruto's more massive slab. He did not have to look to know that his sword was notched deeply along the flat, and that a few more such hard blocks would indeed destroy his weapon rather than the genin's.

But his gamble worked - his blade remained in position while Naruto's bounced back rather than sliding into another guard position, which is what would have happened with a technically better deflection parry. This put Naruto's blade position out of alignment with his footwork for just a moment, slowing his recovery ever so slightly.

These thoughts slid through the mind of the Demon of the Mist in a split-second. He had to follow through quickly while the initiative was his!

Under the wrappings about his face, Zabusa snarled, rode out the burning chakra rush in his legs as he spun to his left at the limit of what his joints could take, then shifted the chakra so quickly from his legs to his torso and arms that it shocked his coils, leaving his limbs tingling. With all the strength he could muster in his arms, driven by the turning of his hips and the core muscles, Zabusa heaved his blade in a great circle about his head for additional power and struck diagonally with a perfectly placed zornhau.

The point of impact was nearly at the point of Zabusa's sword, where the blade had the greatest velocity and the most torque, and it struck Naruto high on his right, directly where the ribs were.

The armored brat stumbled leftwards a few steps, and steadied. And chuckled. There was not even a dent on the fluted plates of the cuirass.

"Chakra flow right through the armor," Zabusa murmured as he drew back, reassessing their duel. "How much stamina can you possibly have?"

"Caught me by surprise that time. That won't happen again." Naruto charged, beginning another sequence of slashes, opening with a squinting strike towards the right shoulder, following through with a crosswise strike towards the hands, and for a brief moment when Zabusa side-stepped and side-stepped again, was close enough to deliver a steel-covered elbow towards the face, which rocked Zabusa to the side, sent him stumbling.

Blood marred the wrappings on the jounin's face. Spitting a tooth free, Zabusa grimly concentrated on his footwork and the defensive positioning of his sword – Naruto was still coming, there was no let up or hesitation.

His margin for each dodge decreased with each strike, and there was no point in risking another direct block considering the damage the single one had done to his sword, even on the flat. He parried in increasing desperation. Not only was Naruto ramping up the speed of his attacks, the power behind them was spiking too – even the minimal deflections Zabusa performed set the stressed steel to vibrations and shock that traveled down into the hilt and right into his hands, wrists and elbows.

With this much strength behind those blows, a direct block would wrench the sword out of Zabusa's hands, if it did not shatter the blade outright.

Zabusa considered his options, grimacing as his defense was tested ever further. That one attempt to chop the boy in half had been the best shot he was going to get with his blade. Those blasted shoulder spikes and protrusions had nullified the possibility of going for Naruto's neck at the time due to the angles, and now his offense was seriously compromised.

While he concentrated on defense, he employed a form of meditation to try to think things through even as his trained instinct guided his body through the movements of combat.

He now knew that despite the size of his two-handed sword, it would not be able to penetrate that evil-looking steel plate with a slash, even with all his chakra rushing through his muscles at their limit. The Master Cuts were simply not meant for use against armor like this.

While he was one of the rare swordsmen of this age also schooled in the use of armored combat techniques, his chosen sword, a weapon of modern design, was not designed for it; the blade was so broad and the edge so sharp he would not be able to half-sword it, to place a hand on the blade to better guide it in power-thrusts at gaps and weak points in heavy armor, nor would he be able to completely reverse his grip and place both hands on the blade to deliver crushing morte-strikes with the cross-guard and pommel.

How could he have anticipated ever facing anyone using such armor in the modern age? And adapted them to the realities of ninja techniques that were thought to have made such heavy physical protection obsolete?

This brat... this killing beast he faced... was close to mastery in a style of combat designed to destroy unarmored enemies... except that the giant sword in those gauntleted hands, so different from Zabusa's weapon despite the superficial similarities... that tremendous mass and the dull but chisel-shaped edge would be able to smash open even heavy armor. It overcame the limitations of the Meisterhauwen style.

And the holes along the fuller - they were not there just to make a pretty sound when the heavy blade was swung... they were there to allow him to grip the blade itself!

After another strenuous deflection, Zabusa managed to guide the arcing path of Naruto's sword through into a trap – they locked blades, flat straining against flat at an angle, cross-guards jammed together. The Demon of the Mist strained his muscles to their limit once more, pushing chakra to enhance his considerable strength to try to force the armored one back, possibly into a trip or perhaps an opening to allow a leg kick.

Naruto did not take a step back. He held his position with seeming effortlessness, not a tremble in his arms, not a jangle of metal to betray the shaking of muscles straining under the armor. All that suggested that he too was exerting full effort was the sudden calming of the water as more of his chakra was pulled inwards, and the harsh sound of his breathing through the hidden slots of the toothed visor.

With the stillness, they could have, for a moment, seen their reflections in the water.

In his armor, the boy was the same size as Zabusa, and was physically just as strong despite his youth. Unlike Zabusa, there seemed to be no end to his stamina.

"Truly impressive," Zabusa gasped during what appeared to be a lull, but was actually the minute wrestling of blades and bodies, straining to gain an advantage of position. "Now I understand the excessiveness of your weapon. Your swordsmanship is not just the style for blossfechten... Your blade is designed to destroy armor even with techniques from unarmored styles.

"And the modification, the holes... Two sets, one almost midway, another almost at the point - to let you half-sword and morte-strike despite the width of the blade. So I have not seen even half of your sword-use yet.

"Before we continue... what armor exists that requires you to use harnischfechten-type strikes with an armor-smasher like yours? That blade doesn't need it."

Even laughter sounded terrible when it echoed out of the helm.

"Doesn't matter at all, to you." And then Naruto was laughing again. With a shrug of those broad, spike-covered shoulders, the dark warrior shoved Zabusa back, breaking the trap.

Without missing a beat, Naruto reset his guard, and attacked yet again.

Zabusa knew matching swords had become all but pointless. It was time to change strategy, to the devil with his ego.

When that screaming blade snaked out, chopping downwards in a crown strike, it struck Zabusa right in the shoulder, a blow that bisected him down to the hip. His shape exploded into droplets of water.

The kawarimi bought him barely any space at all - the black-armored beast was charging forward and slashing relentlessly, definitely faster than before despite the greater weight of the summoned armor. If his foe had been merely a man-child snarling and roaring before, now, his voice seemed transformed by the acoustics of the helm and visor into truly hellish cries, vicious animal sounds.

Zabusa knew as he threw himself backwards, sheathing his now offensively-useless sword. He was in trouble. There was still that Copy Ninja fool and the other two genin on the shore. He needed to finish this brat and escape!

Again, he pushed as much chakra as he could spare into his legs, ignoring the tingling that marked overuse of the pathways, pumping them madly as he back-pedaled, trying to gain some breathing room even as his fingers danced and wove through complex handseals, and all the while Naruto was pursuing him with the most tireless display of master cut strikes in sequence that the former Mist ninja had ever witnessed.

Most of Zabusa's former colleagues among the Seven might have been faster, some might have been stronger, and a few might have had better technique, but this young one's package of speed, strength, technique and bottomless stamina tested the battle-seasoned elite to his limits.

"Gaki, you are incredible. It will have to be water after all. Suiton: Suiryudan no Jutsu!" He had him! He had finished the sequence and there was no space for the brat to dodge.

At nearly point blank range, the great eruption of water barely had time to form into the dragon shape before it was upon Naruto.

Again, the armored genin roared – rather than trying to dodge, he actually stepped into the blast while striking once more with his sword.

"Damn me," Zabusa murmured, witnessing the other's blade splitting the water dragon right along its length. The thick chisel edge of Naruto's sword was actually diverting the force sideways! It was not enough!

Rapidly, Zabusa's hands and fingers wove through another set of seals even as he flickered to the right with as much speed as he could muster. After all that combat, the water clones, the mist, everything, this would drain his chakra dry.

While Naruto was still deflecting the tail end of the water dragon, the Demon of the Mist unleashed another technique from an angle. "Suiton: Daibakufu no Jutsu!"

"NnngAAARH!" Screaming, Naruto turned his massive sword, forcing its angle to change despite the pressure of the current from the Suiryudan technique, muscles starting to tear from the strain as he attempted to deflect the new incoming attack.

He only managed to catch the edge of the water blast. It struck him at nearly full power, sending him tumbling with such force that his body skimmed again, this time bouncing a dozen times before sinking into the water.

"Naruto!" Sakura cried out even as she followed Sasuke's signal mere moments before for her to stay close to Tazuna.

As Kakashi had started to step forward, Sasuke was already racing along the top of the water. He was running as soon as Zabusa initiated the Daibakufu.

He streaked towards Zabusa, footsteps so fast they barely disturbed the water's surface.

Damn the brat! How did he react so fast? Kakashi pushed himself into his own maxed-out burst of speed, overtaking Sasuke while his hands began a deceptively simple, short group of seals. He exposed his sharingan eye with one hand and in the other crackled to life the burning white glow of blue-white chakra.

Faster still than the leaf jounin, however, a barrage of senbon forced Kakashi to jump and change his course. Another barrage tracked Sasuke, who also had to dance around the throwing spikes. Before they could resume their charge, spears of ice began to thrust out of the water, driving them further back.

Kakashi grunted as he dodged and wove, used the raikiri charge to destroy a spear that came way too close. This was not one of Zabusa's techniques.

So fast that it was as if he appeared out of the air, a figure clad in pale clothes and a hunter mask crouched beside Zabusa, who was panting, trembling, barely staying atop the water.

"Zabusa-san, I'm sorry about the plan. They left me no leeway to knock you out. We have to go."

Zabusa gasped, "I have no chakra left. That black swordsman could not possibly be a mere genin. I would have had trouble killing him even if I had been fresh."

"...I'm sorry, Zabusa-san, but it appears you haven't killed him yet."

Indeed, that dark chakra was pulsing along the water's surface again, they could feel it. And then something rose from the water. The black armor looked different, looked even more beast-like. There were more spikes, but that was not it – it crouched in a way that hinted that the joints of the wearer had changed. And as it howled, it began to stalk towards them.

"Shit," Zabusa muttered. "What the hell is that brat?"

Haku draped the big man's arm over his shoulder. "I'm going to have to take you through the Makyo Hyosho, Zabusa-san."

A series of mirrors crystallized out of the air, hovering above the water in a staggered line extending all the way back onto land, and into the woods, angled to partially face each other.

The black beast slammed the flat of its sword into the water, and that dark, tainted chakra thundered towards them, pushing a huge wave of water in front of it.

But they were already gone, dancing from mirror to mirror faster than any such crude technique could follow.

The beast raised its blade to the sky in triumph, and as it howled, the armor shifted, dripping away, back into oily chakra that seeped into the glowing red seal. It revealed Naruto's heavily muscled body, which appeared to be bleeding from dozens of puncture wounds scattered upon him. The clothes and light armor were ragged, ripped up. His eyes were blank, and the snarl on his face was loosening, becoming slack.

"Sakura!" Sasuke yelled, "Grab Naruto! When the black stuff is gone, there will be nothing left keeping him up. Go! I'll follow those two." He pursued the line of disappearing mirrors.

"Stop!" Kakashi gave chase, wanted to kill the Uchiha. "What is wrong with you? We don't even know how badly Naruto is hurt!"

Sasuke's expression of pure disdain nearly drove the jounin mad. "Kakashi-sensei, Sakura has knowledge of enough medical techniques to keep Naruto alive. Most of those wounds weren't caused by Zabusa, but by that armor. He is tougher than you can imagine.

"Meanwhile, the Demon of the Mist is sucked dry, a gourd scraped inside out."

Already, Sasuke was bouncing through the forest from tree to tree, tracking the marks of fading moisture indicating where the mirrors had melted.

Kakashi kept up as Sasuke continued, "This is our best chance to take out one of the more dangerous missing-nin in the bingo book. Not only that, if we don't eliminate him now, he will strike again and next time, he will choose stealth and deception rather than force.

"He is one of the great assassins of the Mist, not just a combat-specialist the way Naruto is. Can you keep that borrowed sharingan eye of yours active the whole time we have to watch over Tazuna-san? I can't keep mine open that long. And the Demon knows dozens of ways to assassinate someone that would not ever require him to even show his face to us, not to speak of all the ways that the other one who we know almost nothing about could contribute his skills."

The Copy Ninja nearly ground his teeth together. The fucking brat was right!

At that point, they were going through the forest canopy so quickly that the branches whipped by. A mistimed jump could put a twig right through an eye. Not that this would happen, given that both he and the Uchiha brat had their sharingan open, black marks spinning about the pupils, perceptions stretched out as far as they could push it. It allowed them to keep their pace, tracking all the obstacles through their three-dimensional path about the branches and sometimes along the ground, even while detecting the out of place pools of moisture. The sharingan was meant to predict and memorize the movements of enemy ninja, but it was not difficult to adapt it to simply keeping track of objects while they were in motion – though in this capacity it was not quite as good as the byakugan.

"And you're counting on your own bloodline and on my being relatively unscathed to be enough to handle that pale one with the ice bloodline? Cheeky for a genin," Kakashi paused, lips twisting under his mask into a black scowl.

And then the jounin could not help it anymore. He started chuckling. "Damn but you're all an audacious, precocious bunch! So, Naruto is actually even better of a combat-type than I thought, matching a jounin in that respect; Sakura, rather than just the basic academy techniques she's supposed to have, also possesses intelligence-gathering, genjutsu, and medical skills; and you, you are a genius for more than just the eyes you inherited, which you have already advanced to the three tomoe stage entirely on your own."

He continued into outright laughter. Damn them to all the hells! They barely needed him! And he had needed to be rescued by a barbarian of a genin with the crudest weapon he had ever seen!

"All right then. No more babying you or the others, Uchiha-san. After we take out Momochi Zabusa and his ally, this suddenly A-ranked mission probably drops back down to C in difficulty, so it won't matter if we too will have to burn through most of our chakra. If Sakura's got all the skills you say, she can handle anything else that comes up while we and Naruto recover. Let's just do this already."

It was not long before the pools of water stopped appearing, and they instead began to see marks of normal physical travel such as disturbed branches and bark. Their targets were close – that speed technique through the ice must have burned up chakra quickly.

Kakashi and Sasuke burst into a clearing one after the other, their gleaming red eyes allowing them to avoid the traps that they triggered upon passing the perimeter. Falling logs and showers of shuriken fell behind them.

Before them, Zabusa and Haku stood side by side. Zabusa's hands rested on the pommel of his sword, which had been driven point first into the earth before him, and Haku, who had discarded the hunter mask, held his hands clasped together.

Water pooled around the pale boy's feet, and the ground was getting muddy around them in a growing circle.

"Condensing water right out of the air, while pulling it from the ground where there is any. And the ice – what other things can that bloodline do?" Sasuke asked. "It's really too bad for you that you needed time for whatever you gave to Zabusa to restore him. If we were still by the water, you would have been truly formidable."

"I am Zabusa's weapon. You will not harm him!"

Kakashi shook his head. He had seen the type before. "Sasuke, most soldier pills aren't helpful for a ninja as drained as Zabusa was, but he appears to have recovered quite a bit. I'll take care of him – you handle the ice boy."

They darted forward, and engaged.

Kakashi opened with a Katon: Housenka, which Zabusa countered with Suiton: Suijinheki. The bursts of fire were hot enough to set the slightly muddy water barrier sizzling into steam, but did not get through. The steam covered Kakashi's use of an earth technique to slip a kage bunshin beneath Zabusa and try to pull him down, but that turned out to be pointless – Zabusa had only needed to push his sword downwards to destroy the clone. They exchanged a number of lesser techniques, probing, neither gaining an advantage. Kakashi would not be caught with the same trick as before.

They paused and stared at each other, knowing that they had both used up quite a bit of chakra thus far, though Kakashi was certainly better off.

Zabusa shook his head regretfully, "I shouldn't have underestimated that boy with the sword. And Haku underestimated your Uchiha's speed and tracking skill. If we had only had a little more time he would have been able to devise tactics to overcome you..."

"Yeah, well, I underestimated my guys, too. Could happen to anybody, I suppose," Kakashi said, flexing his wrists. It was the end game.

Meanwhile, Sasuke flew in, unloading combination after combination of punches and kicks, which Haku dodged and deflected easily.

Still, Haku had to give up ground and was surprised to note how far away from the two adults they were getting. The Uchiha was not trying to penetrate his defense yet, he was only pushing him away.

Haku sent chakra to his legs, attempted to just outspeed and whirl around Sasuke, who, sharingan tomoe spinning even faster, was able to sidestep and cut the other's path off, switching styles to account for the closer spacing between them to a series of elbow strikes, back fists and knees. Their faces were so close together for a moment that Haku could see his own reflection in the other's red eyes. The whirling black marks were strangely beautiful.

"You're fast even without the mirrors," Sasuke said, smiling softly, keeping up the attack, switching back to longer jabs and kicks when Haku tried to regain some distance. "But I can tell that you depend on your bloodline too much. Something I've learned well from my team-mate is that if your close-in combat is good and your speed is comparable, pure, focused offense is enough to prevent the other from using fancier techniques."

Haku was starting to get desperate. The pill he gave Zabusa would only let him function for a few minutes – once a man's chakra was depleted as far as Zabusa's was, there was no shortcut for recovering it... The pill used a combination of drugs to supercharge the body's adrenaline production, good for a short, temporary recovery of enough stamina to fight and generate chakra again, but afterwards, the body would be even more drained. Pushed too far and so little energy would be left in the body that the user would be comatose once the adrenaline high was used up. If he wasn't dead.

Being preoccupied with this was not helping him against the Uchiha, whose taijutsu was really quite excellent, and seemed to be improving the longer they fought. Though Haku was faster, he was not especially gifted in close hand-to-hand, and it appeared that the Uchiha's doujutsu was enabling him to predict Haku's movements just far enough in advance to compensate for being slower. Parrying was no longer so easy.

Haku's one attempt at offense, which was a low block with his forearms circling to trap Sasuke's deflected punch and twist it into a wrist-lock, was read and avoided so easily he gave up all pretense of trying to trick the other with deceptive physical movements.

If he was to have any chance at all, he needed his best weapon – his mind. But it was so hard to focus! Full retreat? He could escape, but that was not an option, there was no guarantee of drawing the Uchiha away. The red-eyed genin would just turn and help his commander double-team Zabusa.

This was a nightmare. Just as the Uchiha had said, Haku was in nearly the same situation that he had witnessed Zabusa to be in against that armored maniac with the sword. He could not get space to use ninjutsu and the continuous high speed attacks did not allow him to concentrate on his bloodline enough to create a spontaneous water or ice attack because of the delay it took to condense water from the air.

If only he hadn't allowed the Uchiha to drive him this far from the water he had already condensed close to Zabusa! He should have just taken a lesser hit in order to get off a heavy damage jutsu – now, every time he tried to condense some water, Sasuke would manage to get far too close for comfort. Haku's arms were bruising from deflecting elbows and knees.

His keen analytical mind raced through scenarios and possibilities. He had to get Zabusa-san away! They could not die here like this!

A glance at Zabusa's battle nearly cost him a broken nose, and it took a desperate backward roll to avoid the palm-thrust.

Oh, no, no! The Copy Ninja had summoned dogs... The beasts were all over Zabusa. The Demon of the Mist was held immobile, and the pale-haired jounin he was facing again had that deadly blue-white lightning coalescing around his hand.

"No! I can't let him die!" One last time he attempted to get around this red-eyed nemesis.

Suddenly, Haku felt heat blossoming in his legs, then his arms. Sasuke had drawn a kunai when he had been distracted, and behind multiple feints with kicks and palm strikes, the Uchiha closed in with quick stabs to take away the paler boy's biggest advantage – his speed.

Together with the pain, awareness lit up in Haku's eyes. "H-how, I'm faster, so much faster than you..."

Sasuke sighed. His foe was weeping – he did not need to turn behind him to know that Kakashi had finished Zabusa off. He could smell the distinct, unforgettable odor of burnt flesh and blood.

"Poor boy. This is your first real encounter with the sharingan. I hypnotized you, that's all. With these," he tapped near the corner of his eyes, and within that strangely calm, timeless gaze, the black marks slowed, stopped spinning now that they were not needed, "I increased your anxiety for Momochi Zabusa, increased your distraction and your fears, made you doubt in your own taijutsu skills. You even started to slow down - I wasn't sure I could manage that.

"It was when you let me get close. Since then, I've kept my eyes right on yours, and you did not even hear me whispering suggestions to you as we fought. You might have defeated me if you had not defeated yourself."

Haku nearly fell to his knees, but the other boy put an arm around him to keep him upright. Almost an embrace, almost gentle.

The young missing-nin was devastated. He had failed.

"It is unfortunate that you were his weapon. You could have been one of mine. I know that someone such as you can only be wielded by a single man in your lifetime, and that is something I can respect.

"So, goodbye," Sasuke concluded.

"W-wait," Haku moaned as the kunai began to slip between his ribs, began to cut through the lungs, inexorably piercing towards his heart.

Sasuke paused. He would be very disappointed if the other boy started to beg for mercy.

The young ninja, really not much older than Sasuke himself, whispered his last words through the blood foam bubbling up his throat, "Just bury me with Zabusa-san. P-please..."

Sasuke nodded, smiling warmly at the other's too-lovely face even as he completed his thrust and the blade punched through those last vital layers of tissue and muscle, and the life blood poured forth.

--- end chapter 4

Extras: The truth is that as much as I appreciate reviews, I'm too lazy to respond to them individually. Yes, even when there's not many. It's a character fault – I suck. I swear, once upon a time, in another fandom, I tried to respond to every one. But that was years ago.

So, thanks. I'll try to keep the quality up. I've daydreamed my way into an AU where the fox could not be sealed into Naruto because of a pre-existing... condition... for months now, before I made myself write it.

Extra extras (or "an essay about a fake sword and how it might have been if it was real"):

In case people are wondering... there was probably no such thing as a zanbato. None. At least, not like the one that a certain someone in Kenshin used. There may never have been such a weapon used in Japan. There doesn't seem to be a surviving artifact that looks like one (though there are surviving nodachi, which are definitely different). I'm inclined to believe the wikipedia article noting that it probably originated from misunderstandings or bad drawings by travelers of what the Chinese zan madao was like.

The zan madao actually looked like a nagamaki - it had a long handle and a curved blade and looked nothing like Zabusa's sword. If one of you knows a reference that indicates otherwise about the existence of the zanbato (Kenshin and RPG source books don't count), please let me know.

To me, it's most sensible to consider any long, straight-bladed sword that's two-handed to perform more like Western long swords and great swords. Gatts' extra large version only made sense in the context of a world with heavy armor that could be busted open with a chisel-edged, extra-heavy weapon that would probably be too slow to use against unarmored enemies. If you tried to translate such a weapon into a real life situation, it would take one of those really monstrously strong guys who can bench press over 300 lbs in order to wield anything like it and have it not be slow - oh wait, Gatts is fricking buff and huge, isn't he? Hmm.

Forgive me if I go off on a tangent. If you've watched any World's Strongest Man competitions, you'll find that the edge of human ability in terms of strength is really quite astonishing. There are guys in real life that can basically pick up one end of your car and hold it for a minute or two, or pick up and move hundreds of pounds of weight. Or hold up one end of a cart loaded with seven hundred fifty pounds. Heck, consider that Shaq, who is still probably the strongest ever NBA player, can leg-press over eight hundred pounds (some estimates put it at a thousand pounds), and the guys in the strongman competitions are probably stronger.

Anyway, the winner of the 2000 World's Strongest Man was Janne Virtanen, a carpenter from Finland. I imagine that if Gatts got translated into a real life human, his build would probably be similar to Virtanen's - a tall, slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, powerfully muscled man that had both strength and good cardiovascular conditioning.

Let's consider that the heaviest long swords of the West (that were actually used in combat and were not, ahem, parade swords or display swords for the wall) were five to eight pounds in weight. These are swords that armored knights actually fought with, swords that could not penetrate plate armor with a cut but could penetrate the gaps with half-sworded thrusts or that could damage an armored man with the mace-like blows of morte-strikes.

Let's double the weight because the blade is so much broader (in just Gatts' 'middle-sized' sword, let's not think about the Dragon Slayer sword which is utterly unfathomably big) than the blade of surviving long swords. Ten to sixteen pounds. Then we triple it because, as Gatts said when he faced those Blue Whale ultra heavy armored dudes, it has triple the thickness. That's a thirty to forty-eight pound weapon. Let's take the upper end of that range, about and, what the heck, add another couple for an even fifty pounds since the hilt would have to be reinforced and the pommel would need to be quite big so that our strong man could control the blade.

Now, I go to the gym pretty regularly, but I'm still not anything like an athlete in terms of strength. I can lift a forty-five pound dumbbell with one hand. With two hands, lifting (and swinging) fifty pounds is easy, if you only need to do it a few times. However, if you imagine that in a sword, the center of mass ends up being some feet away from your hands... the torque when you swing such a weapon at speed would be incredible. Not to speak of having to swing it over and over in a long fight. A regular dude like me would get his arms practically ripped out of the sockets if I was even strong enough to hang on to the hilt (which I am not).

But it's actually not unimaginable in the hands of our hypothetical real life Gatts with the approximate strength and size of a Janne Virtanen.

Anyway, this long essay doesn't have a point really, it's just my wandering thoughts. But imagine such a warrior in real life, a guy something over six feet who weighed close to three hundred pounds, wearing a hundred pounds of armor. With the same incredible strength that lets him easily lift and carry a three hundred fifty pound ball, this man could probably swing that monster sword at a speed comparable with the speed that normal swordsmen can swing normal swords. Just picture it... Conan, eat your heart out.

Adding the supernatural element of chakra in the Naruto world and our Gatts (no longer 'real life' Gatts, but hey, its entertaining) is probably at the level of Gatts with the berserker armor inhibiting his pain sense and allowing him to max out his muscles on every move. And since he can stick to the ground, he doesn't need to worry about losing his footing due to the momentum of his swings. This is more or less the state of mind I put myself in when I try to imagine how our Naruto/Gatts hybrid would fight.

One last addition. (Feb 2008): I've read some guys who believe that the zanbato was a 2 man weapon used to bring down horses and only forged by peasants during war time, then reforged into tools afterwards. That's a ridiculous theory. It would take years of training for two people to coordinate an attack with a heavy weapon against a fast-moving target - training that peasants, who have to farm/clean/raise families/etc do not have the time to do. In addition, there's so much iron in the weapon you could easily arm thirty people with spears using the same amount of metal - and anybody can use a spear with minimal training. Would you rather have 2 people swinging something at a horseman that will probably miss, or thirty people with spears? That 2-man idea is totally impractical.


	5. Chapter 5

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 5: Improving Utility

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

Dawn. The sun crept over the line of treetops at the horizon. Awe-inspiring trees, living towers several times thicker at the base than men were tall. The light was warm and the breeze was soft, but bit into exposed skin with the hint of a chill, speaking of climes far to the north. The sky was a mess of color that, with chakra in one's eyes, was tinged with hues beyond the normal spectra, with reds more red than red, fading into shades of electric blue.

He had already been there for an hour and the sweat whipped off his skin as he swung his sword one-handed in a simple downward chop. He halted it when the blade was parallel with the ground, drew it back up high overhead, and chopped again. The leather straps that held the rows of lead ingots tight against the steel snapped back and forth against the flat sides with each stroke. With the weighted straps on, altering the air flow through the two sets of grip holes along the fuller, the weapon did not shriek or moan as was usual, but only whispered.

Sweat soaked into the bandages covering his shoulders, his bare chest, his elbows and knees – the places where the spikes of the black armor had cut into him to hold his body together when he had tried to wrench his sword to block the second water blast and failed.

The rage took him for a moment, and he managed to push it down before his practice strokes could plow into the rocky ground. The sword could take it, but he might accidentally start a fissure in the monument that would damage the huge stone faces of Konoha's leaders. While he did not give a shit about offending the villagers, he could respect the symbol for what it was.

The roar of the waterfall, – he tried to keep his mind on those few perfect days in his other memories. Anger was useless without control, which was the reason for the location of his current solo training session.

It was a place where chakra behaved with a subtle difference. There was a convergence beneath the faces of the past Hokage of Konoha, a nexus of the lines of energy of the earth itself. It made everything a bit heavier, distorted the air just so to make it seem higher than it was – a distortion in space too subtle for most to notice.

Here, the weight of the brand on his neck diminished, its ever-present stain on his coils lighter, looser. He had been to the handful of temples in the Fire Country that boasted similar peaceful auras, but here, there had been no cultivation by the careful attentions of generations of monks. Here, at the mass of stone upon which the Leaf had carved the faces of their very best, nature had spontaneously bestowed its blessings in ancient times, when the world was molten and currents of naked chakra swirled upon its surface.

Naruto was not aware of this difference at an intellectual level, but he could sense it in his gut. With his awareness of chakra that he did not have in that other life, he reached out consciously, trying to take in all that was around him, stretching out blindly for that state of inexplicable oneness that seemed just out of reach.

The muscles in his arms, shoulders and back burned but did not matter, nor did the aches from his injuries, to which he was still diverting chakra in order to prevent reopening them. Everything could make you stronger if you focused properly, even pain and suffering.

Before dawn, he had already done hundreds of strokes with the weighted sword using his left hand, and now he was repeating the feat with his right. Earlier he had added a half-pound more lead to the already loaded straps on his weapon, an increase over his usual training weight that would not be at all significant had it been attached to his wrists or ankles, but which produced extra torque and momentum he could feel due to the moment arm of the weight being extended so far.

The battle with the so-called Demon of the Mist had been a reminder. This age had so many truly impressive warriors – the development of refined chakra techniques could give a man of average physical talent and coordination what would have been considered legendary ability during the life in his other memories. And magic was too common..

He needed to grow stronger and faster still, frowning at the thought of that Uchiha. Sasuke's improvement in speed was alarming – Naruto had to strive ever harder. His sword could do unendurable, unstoppable damage, but that was useless if his opponent had such an edge in speed that it enabled either dodging the strikes or maintaining enough distance to just rain long-range jutsu down on him.

His breath turned to mist in the cold morning air, puffs of white at his mouth with each mighty effort of the muscles all along his body, tightening and releasing. He had to concentrate on his feet too, ignored the added warmth from having to increase the amount of chakra that held him to the ground and kept the sword's inertia on the downward stroke from jerking him into a fall.

His thoughts wandered to that self-satisfied bastard's clinical report of the way he and Kakashi had taken down the Demon and his tool. It increased the force of his next swings, increasing the dull surges of pain in his arm and back and the side where the ribs had almost cracked. He could feel the wounds starting to pull, and slowed down with a muttered curse.

He had not been alone for a good ten minutes by then and was hoping she would just go away.

"How you do that without popping your shoulder out of the socket?" She knew it was a stupid question, but figured that she had to open with something.

"Why are you here?" he grunted. He tried to find the remains of his initial contempt for her, but it had changed into something else. The feeling that he tried to ignore was one of disgust at himself. "Look... you kept me from drowning and did your medic junk, and I know it. I'll... pay you back."

Sakura pushed the hair back from her face. At this hour, the dawn's light changed the look of her hair, turned it darker, warmer. Her mouth quirked at one corner and Naruto was aware of all this though he was facing away from her.

"That's, ah..." she paused and forced down the grin and the desire to gloat. He'd be extra-brutal in their next training session together as is. What should she say? 'That's unnecessary' wasn't quite right. Definitely nothing like 'You're welcome.'

"Okay, whatever," she said at last.

"Why are you here?" he repeated. "You hate mornings."

This part, well there was not much of a way to defuse it. So she just said it, "Sasuke told me to talk to you." She could detect the animal in him starting to bristle, rushed through the rest, "It's eating you, and whatever, I don't get you like Sasuke does, but he said you'd let me talk because. Because I was the one who killed Gatou, which I don't understand the relevance of at all and which I still get nightmares about. Anyway, anyway. He knew you wouldn't listen to anything he'd say about extra training, but you might not totally ignore me."

"..."

"You almost had him. You were incredible. But there's two reasons why Zabusa had your number.

"He was still faster than you. And he had mid- to long-ranged techniques."

She waited a bit, just watching the black-haired genin. In the weeks they had been together in a team, he must have already grown another half an inch. His muscles were larger, his shoulders detectably more broad, the cords of muscle under the skin tighter. She wondered how many pounds of lead he would add to the weight straps over the next month, and what Naruto would do when there was no more room for extra training weight on the blade.

"I'll get a bigger sword," he grunted, startling her.

"How..."

"That pretty-boy bastard isn't the only one who can read people."

She considered the amount of steel there already was in his sword. "How often do you change swords?"

"Once a year."

Sakura thought about the rate at which he increased his speed and strength simply by scaling up the weight on his sword until he had to get another. He was faster than herself and Sasuke when they had just met, and was faster still already. What was he pushing himself so hard for?

"When will your weapon be enough?" There were distinct limits on what he could reach no matter how much he trained. Then again, thought the kunoichi, maybe he had a secret bloodline that would let him just keep growing until he was a ten or twelve foot giant.

"...There is a weapon that already exists. Physically, I'm strong enough to use it. I'm just not big enough yet. I don't have the height – I'd slam the point through the ground with half my techniques. It is the only sword of mine that has a name. It is the last sword I will ever use in this lifetime."

She remembered his beast-shape when he wore the black steel, and shivered. "What about that... armor... do you get a larger set every year?"

"It... doesn't need repair or adjustment. That armor grows with me."

Sakura sighed. "Look, you're an amazing swordsman. But... well, I know you've got a brain in that meat-head. It would help you in a lot of combat situations if you had jutsu for dealing with much faster enemies."

He paused when he raised his sword for another strike. He placed both hands on the hilt, and vanished in a patter of thundering footsteps and a cloud of dust.

Sakura managed to keep in the yelp. She had developed a sense for when there was really a chance of him hurting her, and now was not one of those times. But it was just unnerving to see him disappear and then that humongous blade blurring into existence right beside her head and over her shoulder. Especially since he had gotten behind her. And the weighted straps were still on that thing. The sudden dark shadow of it right in her field of vision made her flinch.

"...Fuck you. The wind from that showing off you just did messed up my hair."

She could feel him grinning in response. He was such a weirdo! He responded better to anger than anything resembling friendliness or compassion. He took insults better than compliments and was happier getting hit in the face than getting his wounds tended to.

"Okay, so you're fast, and getting faster all the time. Would it really hurt for you to learn some more techniques? You can't beat everyone with just that sword and speed."

Slowly, majestically, the blade rose past her field of vision, and she let loose a breath as she turned to face him.

Naruto sheathed the sword, still weighted, and was scowling fiercely at her. "If you hadn't noticed, people here don't like me much," he bit off. "Nobody will be just handing me jutsu scrolls."

"Sasuke will. Stop growling at me! Look, he's got his whole clan library, a collection of techniques built up by a family that specializes in stealing techniques. You won't even need to see him. You won't even need to be there. He'll just pass scrolls to me and I'll... learn them with you."

Naruto's fists clenched.

"It's not like I'll get nothing from it, I'll be learning the jutsu too and... and..." and this part sucked, but Sasuke had told her to say it as well, "and I could learn some sword-work from you."

The big genin's brow shot up in surprise. "You... will learn... from me."

"That's the idea." She bit her lip and crossed her fingers. Sasuke would be pissed if she didn't get Naruto to agree. Not in the loud, yelling way that her parents could get mad at her, but in this quiet disappointed way that was so much worse, that ripped her up inside.

"Okay. We can do that." If he taught her... If... When the time came that everything would go to hell... She would have a chance if she took what he had to teach seriously.

He laughed and it was perhaps less hopeless than the usual sound of it. But it made her shiver. It somehow sounded meaner at the same time.

"Let's go."

"Go where?"

He turned and walked off into mid-air, jumped down the face of Yondaime. She took a breath and followed. He was so big but he moved like lightning! Showing weakness now would undo all her effort so far. She had to keep up, and she had to be able to talk to him without seeming to struggle with keeping her breath despite the grueling pace. Falling from the crown, bouncing off the cheek, flipping, skidding and running down the nearly vertical slope the rest of the way down.

"You can have the sword from when I was six."

"Hey, I'm not that puny you know!"

Naruto shook his head. "You've never handled anything bigger than a dagger. What I'll give you is only about three pounds, but try swinging it with all you've got for ten minutes and those sticks you have for wrists will give up. Your shoulders will ache like nothing you've felt before. And..."

"And what?" The things she did for Sasuke...

"You'll hate me," and with that, Naruto smiled, both warm and mean, closed and open.

As quickly as it had appeared, the smile was gone and Sakura wondered if she had just imagined it. It made him look so much less savage, softened the brutish angles of his face. It made him look... young. Like his real age. It made her want to take a comb to that wild mess of black hair.

"You wish!" she exclaimed, chest and legs on fire, hiding it all with a smirk as they scrambled from rooftop to rooftop.

---

Well, he wasn't quite right. But it was close enough that she did hate him some. It took thirty minutes instead of ten, but yes, the pain was just like he said.

The sword was a little over three feet from pommel to point. The grip was eight inches long, leather bound wood – plenty of room for both her small hands. The blade was straight-edged and deeply fullered, with an easily visible distal taper. It would have been lighter because of the fuller and taper, but it was also thicker overall than most swords of that size, though not to the same proportions as Naruto's current weapon.

"N-no more... please," she gasped.

"Hmm. Twenty more with the left hand, then we'll go back to the right hand."

She groaned. "Can't we take the leather and the wooden sheets off the blade at least?"

"Hah! No. You banged up your foot when you lost control on a chop. What would that be like with naked steel?"

So much for removing the extra weight. Even the few ounces of the leather and wooden protective cover was a hellish addition.

It really was different from handling lighter weapons.

What needled her and set her inner self to complaining was seeing his image beside her in the mirrors along the wall. He was going through the exact same motions as her with that much more ugly piece of steel in his hands and he made it look effortless.

"Keep the shoulders straight!" he barked. "We haven't even begun the proper forms and strikes yet. We're still at the goddamn warm up and you're already lagging."

When they finally got through her right-handed set, her inner self cried when he said it was time for the real work.

She had thought that her hands had gotten tougher since she had started really training under Sasuke the last couple of years in the Academy, but she could feel her palms blistering even with the tight wrappings protecting them.

"No you stupid oaf! It won't help me be stronger if you work me so hard that I get injured!" She winced as she flexed her hands, feeling a blister pop.

He noticed the pained expression in her face as she looked at her hands.

"Shit girl, what happened to the brain in that airhead of yours? You got medic skills – use them."

Sakura grimaced. It was much, much harder using healing techniques when she hurt. The fact was that it demanded perfect control to use chakra to heal, and it was hard to maintain control when pain distracted a medic's concentration.

"Right. No problem." Explaining that would've been pointless of course.

She set the sword down on the floor gently – heaven forbid she just drop it! He'd backhand her into next week. She sat cross-legged, closed her eyes and willed the pain away. Willed away annoyance too – she would screw it up if her emotions fluctuated while applying the flow of energy.

Centered, she molded just the smallest amount of chakra and sent it to her hands. She popped the blisters with pinpricks of blue light, drained them by pushing against the layers of her skin with more light applications of energy, and then set to coaxing the skin to heal.

That was the easy part.

Then she placed her hands, which glowed at that point, on her most sore muscle groups one after the other, the forearms, the shoulders, spots on her lower back, applying a technique for dealing with poison. This would deal with the acid build up in the muscles, converting it into other metabolites.

Just as she was about to shift to a means to start repairing the muscles, the heavy hand on her shoulder jarred her out of the healing trance so fast that chakra jetted out of the tenketsu on her palms. At least it lost coherence quickly enough that it could not damage her, which would have been rather humiliating.

"What?" she snapped. "You said use my - "

"Woman, you should know the way muscle works better than I do. If you use chakra to repair your muscles, how are they going to grow and improve your strength?"

"O-oh... right..." her cheeks burned. At least the blush was not visible, hidden by the flush brought on by heavy exercise. "I, uh, I was going on automatic and... Never mind." Excuses were useless on Naruto. But... how the hell had he known what she was about to do?

"Just take care of the blisters.

"As for the rest - stress and recovery, yes? Today, we work your muscles into such stiffness that tomorrow you'll barely be able to crawl. You'll have a few days off training with the blade until it's time we work you into the ground again. You are NOT to try to train with the sword on your own. You aren't ready and you'll just teach yourself bad habits."

Sakura frowned. Well, she did not need to be at her physical peak to handle learning ninjutsu with Naruto, since that mostly involved chakra flow and proper handseal sequence, but - "It's going to take longer to learn proper technique with that much downtime between sword training."

"I'll keep an eye on you and watch your form for now. Your muscles are toned and such from the training you already do, they just don't have the strength for sword work yet, so that's what we concentrate on first. The downtime will decrease. Technique is worthless without power, even with edged weapons. Now pick up your sword, and I'll take you through some of the Master Cuts."

She rose, picked up the sword, and winced at how tight her shoulders and wrists felt. It was not quite as bad in her legs, but she could feel it too in her thighs. And seeing how so many of Naruto's attacks depended on additional power from his legs, she knew that they would hurt pretty badly tomorrow as well.

"You know I'm going to get you back for this later, when we're learning from the scrolls."

"Hah! You're not going to outlast my stamina, girl."

"Oh? I think I have ways to compensate for that."

For a moment, the sneer on his face softened. "I'm sure you do," he said softly. It was the challenge in her eyes, the self-doubt and at the same time, the will to survive whatever was coming next. That look did not belong on her face. He did not want it to.

She wondered what it was he felt, eyeing her like that. And then stopped wondering, because she had to focus her attention on every minute detail as Naruto took a guard position, obviously expecting her to follow suit. She noted the position of his feet as best she could based on their reflections in the mirror.

He was a good twenty feet away from her to maintain plenty of room for their movements, so she had to exert a lot of effort on being aware of his body so that she could imitate the poses and moves.

"The plow," he said, "right side."

It was a middle guard, with the hilt at the level of the waist, the point angled out in front and upwards. The hands were crossed below, the forward edge was down, the pommel close to the right hip. The knees were bent, the feet not quite perpendicular, left foot forward.

"Thrust."

She was just starting to adjust her feet to better match his when his sword slowly began to slide forward, and she focused on that exaggerated slow motion to follow it with her whole body into a thrust. There was some rotation too, resulting in a horizontal position for the blade at full extension.

"The ox, right side."

Smoothly, blade parallel to the ground, he retracted it and raised it. The hands were still crossed, but as he raised it, the blade rotated more so that what he told her was called the 'short' edge, the back edge that did not exist in katana, lowered, stayed oriented toward his body. The right elbow was high, the left elbow at the level of the shoulders.

"Crosswise strike."

Again, sliding so smoothly it was almost hypnotic when performed at this slow pace, he moved into another attack, a high horizontal slash sweeping from right to left with the short edge, rotating the whole blade upright to recover to 'the roof' guard, a high guard with the hilt over the head and the blade angled back at forty-five degrees.

They continued like this, with her trying to match his motions and pace, and him softly announcing the names of the stances and the strikes. This was the gentlest she had ever heard his gravelly voice.

At first, she was always a little behind and rushing to catch up, but as she fell into rhythm with his motions, she was surprised at how natural the movements felt despite the returning aches in her arms and back. So much so that she did not notice them speeding up together until they were gliding through the footwork and the sword motions, the defenses and attacks, at what was close to full speed for her.

She was almost waiting to either drop her sword or get her feet crossed resulting in her falling, but somehow, magically, her body always seemed to know what was coming next.

Finally, when her arms were already trembling and the muscles were twitching under her skin, they slowed, slowed, stopped in the stance they had begun the sequence in.

"That was... cool," Sakura murmured. She wanted to say it was beautiful but thought that wouldn't be received very well. "Is there are a name for that kata we just did?"

His voice was rough again, jarring her with the difference from when they were moving together, "There are no kata in this style. I just showed you some of the strikes possible from the different guard stances and which stances they lead to. It is about spontaneously moving to take advantage of your opponent's position with the handful of options you have given your distance from each other and the geometry of your blades. You position yourself continuously when you aren't in proper attack range and attack continuously when you are, because with this style, attack is defense."

"I don't get that at all," she said. It was so different from the way she had learned taijutsu and basic weapon work at the academy.

"You don't have to get it, groupie. You just have to do what I say. Go on, take the wrappings off the sword, sheathe it and put it back on the rack." He unstrapped the weighted leather on his own weapon and hung the massive sword on a set of hooks on the wall. He tossed the leather belts into the closet, ignoring the dull clanking of the padded lead. He rummaged around and pulled a sleeveless tunic on.

Sakura tried not to think about the look of his chiseled, glistening muscles, his scarred, sun-bronzed skin. It was gross... Though, she had to admit he was sculpted as no one their age was. She took a deep breath and as she did so, realized that she was exhausted. "What about stretching?" She would hate to cramp up now...

"What, you didn't notice? The last set of slow strikes was all the stretching you need."

He looked disappointed with her for a moment, until she scowled fiercely at him. That was better.

"After lunch, as you said, groupie, it will be your turn. Tell me about what techniques the precious Uchiha is going to start us on while we eat."

As they descended the stairs from his studio, every step jarred Sakura's aching flesh, she wondered about the kind of life Naruto lived. His big apartment was clean, which only emphasized how empty it was. There was a bedroll in the corner, a closet full of gear, racks of swords, a crate with polishing stones and rags, a trunk of clothes, and the mirrors along one wall. And that was all. His kitchen looked like it was never used. The fridge was similarly bare, containing only a number of bottles of water. There were no posters or pictures anywhere on the walls, no mementos.

"Sasuke told me not to open the scrolls until we started, so I don't know." She was suddenly so aware of her hunger that her stomach was clenched up tight. "Where are we eating?"

"The steak house. Might as well use some of that cash that the girlie prick got for us by going through that Wave gangster's finances. And you'll need the meat."

"...I can't believe that you were as strong as I am now when you were just six."

"My muscles, girl. But while I had an idea of chakra back then there were no jutsu that I could perform. I'm not a poser – I was hardly formidable then."

She pondered that for a bit, mouth quirking. "You saying I'm 'formidable?'"

He felt it then, and knew that Sasuke was watching them from the rooftops. He did not acknowledge the other's smile, tried not to care at all about anything.

So he just snorted and responded, "I'm saying that, right now, you could beat me when I was six. But not with a sword, since you're not even ready to spar yet."

Hell yeah. She knew what he meant and her inner self was torn between cheering and the desire to smack him upside the head. As Sasuke had predicted, starting to train with him in a more personal way made him more comprehensible. It was weird, but that compliment from Naruto buoyed her up just like the rare praise she got from Sasuke, though in a much more ambivalent way.

It was quite an experience for Sakura to have even her inner self feeling divided about something.

Still, her cheeks warmed, and maybe, it wasn't so bad that she was stinky, covered in sweat, with her hair mussed up badly, and that she would ache tremendously the next day enough to feel like dying.

Maybe it wasn't so bad today. But tomorrow would suck.

Well, tomorrow, maybe she could visit Sasuke and comfort herself with whatever approval he saw fit to give her for succeeding in getting Naruto to agree.

---end chapter 5


	6. Chapter 6

Naruto: BERSERK

by Lousy Poet Automaton

-----disclaimers: Berserk and Naruto are not mine. The lines after the chapter title appear in every episode of Berserk. You don't have to know Berserk to read this fanfic, and I wouldn't even say it's a true crossover or fusion since it really all happens in the Naruto universe. Anyway, if you have read/watched Berserk, I'm not sure if your appreciation will be greater because you can guess at what's hinted at, or less because you can guess what's hinted at.

Chapter 6: Talons

"In this world...

man's destiny is controlled...

by some transcendental destiny or law"

"Like a hand of God

that exists."

"At least...

man knows that he has no control

over his own will..."

---

So foolish and brave. She was feverish in his arms. Hot, bare skin pressed against his. And pretty, in that hard way of hers. Broad shoulders, corded arms, but she had that tiny waist too, and for all her wiry muscle and calluses and scars, she was all that was warm and soft and perfect. Had he really thought that he would never want a woman this way?

There were a hundred men hunting them that night. He already knew he would kill them all, for her.

And they would call him 'Century Slayer.'

Naruto opened his eyes and blinked.

He hated dreaming of her. Losing her had been agony worse than losing a hand.

"Never," he whispered. "Not ever again."

Threw on a tunic and his boots, buckled on the harness for his sword, latched the weapon into place across his back, placed a pair of small knives into each boot.

He opened his window, leaped out into the night. He threw himself from rooftop to rooftop, muscles in his legs bunching, powerful springs. The wind whipped his hair back, and he snarled as he pushed himself to run faster and jump farther. He was doing this without using chakra to enhance his muscle performance, and once, twice he almost did not make it, almost slipped upon landing at the edge of the next roof.

There was no moon that night, and the shadows made some distances seem farther, some seem shorter.

And then he was there. He placed a hand on the window, noted the latch inside. He supposed he could use one of his own self-developed techniques. Not a totally original technique, but an offshoot of what some of the warrior monks he had learned from could do. It was another way he had learned to make destroying things more efficient, but it had its finer uses also.

He grit his teeth as the bones of his hand began to vibrate from the rhythmic pulsing of chakra he forced down to the ends of the fingers. With the palm flat against the wooden frame, he concentrated, directed the vibration through the solid matter. It took every bit of his control. This type of wood was not a good conductor of vibration – the structure of the wood itself damped out this kind of energy.

Not quite working – for him to get enough energy to the latch, he would probably end up disintegrating the wood.

He pushed chakra to his feet and clung to the wall. He drew a knife in each hand and carefully worked the narrow blades into the frame, slightly offset from each other, pointed at the latch.

It was definitely easier with a weapon. His own bones and flesh did not vibrate so much this way.

He directed the chakra pulses into the knives, set the vibrations to overlap just at the point where the latch was screwed into the window. Yes, this was working. The wood was damping the vibrations enough to keep the glass panes from humming, but the combined vibrations were resonating right at the point of the screws. Slowly, they were twisting out.

The metal latch fell onto the carpeted floor within.

Looking through the glass, his face quirked in disgust. The figure under the blankets hadn't even twitched at the sound. Of course, he supposed, children trained to espionage and killing had to have one place where they felt safe, where they could just relax. He would change that, for her own good.

Naruto slid the window up, and carefully, quietly, he levered his big body through. Years of training allowed him to subconsciously keep track of the position of the weapon on his back so that it would not slam into anything and give him away.

He padded over to her bed, and looked down on her, face twisted in a grimace, a snarl.

His hand hovered just over her face. This one was nothing like her! He clamped that big, heavy hand over her mouth, and as she struggled awake, eyes fluttering in panic at the dark outline that took up so much space in her vision, she placed her little hands on his wrist, tried to bring in her knees, anything. But he was far too strong, and her legs were tangled up in her own blankets.

He actually lifted her upright and off the bed with the one hand, and as she dangled from his arm, hands clutching at his wrist to take some of the weight off her neck, her legs flailed ineffectually. His body was too far to knee, and she had no leverage to kick with any power.

"You sleep like the dead, Sakura-chan," Naruto grinned menacingly.

The sound of his voice was both relieving and alarming. What the fuck was the big oaf doing in her room? What time was it?

"If I was someone else, you would be dead."

Now she was fucking pissed off. Had she really just started to like this goon? When he finally dropped her onto her feet, her inner self was screaming murder and wanted to beat his meat-face in.

Quietly, she snarled, "What the hell? It's 3 am, you shit..."

Damn it, his fingers had dug into her face like steel bands. She would have to heal the bruising later. If Naruto didn't go all psycho on her and crush her, of course.

"Your form was crap yesterday. You just have no talent for this."

That terrible look on her face was both what he was looking for, and something a part of him was saddened by.

For just a moment, her lip trembled, and he could see those eyes glisten. And then she let out the mad.

She jumped forward, thrust-kicked him in the chest. It didn't even rock him, but so what? She was launched backward, and that was the point. Crouched low, whipping a hand under her bed, she unsheathed the sword even as she raised it into guard position, a variant of the plough.

He was already out through the window, and she gave chase. She would wipe that smirk off his face if it killed her.

---

Drinking with Gai was always an experience.

"Ah, ha," he said. He was not actually loud all the time – the way he talked just projected more, it cut through all background sound. "So you have adapted yourself to the stars of their talent?"

Kakashi tossed another one back, mask raised just enough to reveal his mouth.

"They're not so bad. When they aren't trying to kill somebody. Or each other. Which seems to be all the time."

---

Back on simple D-class missions, the days passed quickly. Most of each day was spent in training, either separately, or together, or with other teams.

Watching her with him was entertaining. She was so different with him, which amused Sasuke to no end. After all, he and Naruto were more alike than she could imagine. The differences, however... ah, such small differences were reflected in their true significance within the mirror of the world.

It was not the skills that Naruto was teaching her that mattered – it was the growth within her that this forced. She would change more and more as the three of them worked together. Maybe she would not even remember that it had only taken a few words and a kiss to get her started down this road some years ago.

The girl was sensitive to such trifling things. So willing to change so much for so little, for things that barely mattered to Sasuke.

Slowly, she was responding to Naruto in that way, too: the shift in her body posture around the much bigger genin; the intense curiosity in her gaze.

After the night that Naruto had pissed her off to a height of anger she had never felt before, Sakura had advanced enough to start sparring with him. Naruto used a massive wooden blade with a lead core – it was the only way to get a wooden implement to weigh enough. Sakura had a more reasonably sized weapon, also with a lead core.

She had not been able to touch him yet. Despite how much lighter her practice sword was, and how much better it ought to have been once she got under his range, she could not touch him, and the frustration in her blazing eyes was exquisite. She would circle and dart in with all the quickness she could muster and with almost slow-motion movements, Naruto would force her to back off merely by changing the angle that he held his weapon. She just wasn't fast enough yet.

And in Naruto's eyes, Sasuke could detect a change, too. Yes, this is what that man needed. Sasuke would not let him destroy himself, not for things that did not matter anymore.

Breeze rustling the leaves around his hiding place in the trees, while his eyes stayed on them through the windows. "The mistake was not acknowledging you as an equal," Sasuke murmured. "I won't forget. No one possesses you. But the dream, if you had my dream, too... it would be enough."

Sasuke left Naruto's apartment and proceeded back to the Uchiha estate. He looked forward to the first of the planning sessions he had convinced Aburame and Nara into joining. They did not like him or trust him, but both intelligent, analytical boys were still weak to certain forms of manipulation.

Shino, with his subconscious desire for order and coordination, and Shikamaru, with his fear of responsibility and failure holding him back from making the most of his gifts... Presented with strong leadership and evidence of decent strategic ability, they would both prefer for someone else to command.

Their minds would be important. Sasuke would not burn himself out trying to think out every contingency – proper leadership required skilled delegation. When they grew into the roles Sasuke had planned for them, Aburame and Nara would handle a significant amount of the tactical and logistical burden... freeing Sasuke to focus on large-scale strategy, socio-political concerns, and maintaining his personal combat skills.

They were there, in front of one of the lesser side gates, looking both impatient and resigned.

"You're early," Sasuke said to them, smiling slightly. If they had seen him killing Haku, they might have found the expression eerie instead of puzzling.

Shikamaru grumbled, tugging at a scroll under his left arm, "Here's the analysis of the village defenses, and the best plan I could come up with to handle the situation you specified."

Shino merely tapped at a small notebook he carried. "And mine, for the exam."

"Not here. Come on."

Sasuke lead them down the twisting stone path that lead to one of the smaller receiving chambers. The garden they passed through might have been beautiful once, but neglect had left most of the flower beds choked out by weeds, and a few of the trees strangled by vines. It was almost like a jungle, and he noticed them eying some wasps flitting about, with a few trapped in a spider's web arranged about some of the branches of the cherry tree by the door into the western guest house.

"I won't waste money on a groundskeeper when I'm the only one living here," he explained. "One day, I shall. This is my ancestral home and it must be made fit to entertain... well, that's for much later."

Shikamaru shook his head. Sasuke was even stranger than he had thought. The Uchiha sincerely believed in uniting the ninja villages, with him as the head. It was crazy... but Shikamaru could not help finding the glimpses that Sasuke had unveiled to be intriguing. And the problems Sasuke gave to him were very stimulating. Part of Shikamaru was entranced by the game of it all, but he was also alarmed at the deadly seriousness in the way Sasuke framed the scenarios.

It had kept him up at night for many long hours. He knew that Shino's problem was simpler, and involved devising a means to maximize the chances for the nine rookie genin to all pass the chuunin exam the first time they took it together.

What Sasuke had given him though... Shikamaru had been presented with an invasion of Konoha. And the goal? To make the best use of the rookie genin in terms of the welfare of the village: a much more complex, multi-objective problem. He knew that it was subtle praise for his mental capacity, but while he refused to trust the Uchiha, the implied compliment worked despite himself, and when he wasn't actively trying to be upset about it, Shikamaru felt pleased with himself and his proposed solution.

"Give me a few minutes. I'll prepare some tea before we begin." Sasuke walked behind a counter in the room, poured bottled water into a pot that he placed atop the stove behind it.

As the two guests sat around a low coffee table, Shino said, "These scenarios – they are extremely detailed. Are these situations events that you know will happen, or is this all just games and theory?"

Shikamaru had wondered that himself, but knew that asking would be pointless.

That smile again. "No one knows the future."

Hours spent working through the minutiae of their tactics, debating every point of contention. But soon, they agreed on the optimal approaches their teams would take to maximize the chances of all three of their teams passing the chuunin exam. They tentatively agreed on an approach to make the most of their teams' abilities for the hypothetical situation of an invading force.

Soon it was night, and his guests were tired, talked out, satisfied – they left feeling an odd sort of excitement, a kind of anticipation they did not really understand.

Well... there was still the one other guest. It had been three days. Sasuke decided that he needed to attend to this special visitor once more.

He ascended to the attic of the tallest building at the heart of the Uchiha grounds. Cobwebs were allowed to remain everywhere, to give the illusion of disuse. Behind a mirror, through a closet, through hidden doors and twisting passages, crawling among the traps he was so familiar with, sliding by poisoned edges in total darkness, he descended within the walls, back down to the level of the ground, and then deep below.

He came to a pool at the base of an old well. The water was old and stagnant, and strange fungi glowed along the walls. He dove into the water, and swam along passages that were still trapped, still designed to disorient.

He rose from the water into a low-ceilinged hall. He flicked a switch and the light of flickering yellow bulbs sputtered to life. He would replace them at some point. The light revealed old bloodstains on the ground, and scattered implements of steel, chains, ropes, pulleys, spikes. The room was crude and unfinished. The floor was dirt and water collected in pools here and there. The ceiling was braced with wooden beams that were old, terribly old.

Foul smells dominated that room. Rotting blood, old feces and urine.

Sasuke smiled that subtle smile of his once more, as he heard the skritching, the scratching, the reedy whispering.

He walked to the far corner of the little dungeon, to what seemed to be a coffin. Narrow slits in the iron cover allowed air through, and revealed wild, impossibly wide open eyes. Eyes that could have been crazed, but weren't, were filled with horrific rationality.

Sasuke unlatched the lock and opened the lid, the underside of which was covered with spikes. Before him lay the ruin of a man.

"Why, hello there, Kabuto-san. You didn't think I'd forgotten you? You know, you've told me so many interesting things over the past weeks, and yet, somehow, I think there's more."

The gray-haired man should have been only a little older than Sasuke, should have been in the prime of his life. But lines crisscrossed his face, extended everywhere over his shriveled, naked flesh. The lines of age, and the paler, thicker, gnarled lines of scars.

There was an almost-moan of response, and there were also the constant tears. His guest had never imagined how terrible it could be to heal from almost any injury, to be forced to go on even as the systematic cutting, piercing and burning of his flesh also went on.

Sasuke pinched, pulled, prodded those skeletal limbs. "Excellent. I am impressed. Already, you're starting to regain some muscle there. Your healing is definitely faster. Mm. But why do your biceps grow back more quickly than the triceps? I am sure I left more on the backs of your arms – those areas should heal more quickly... Well, I shall just have to slice some more away from the biceps, I suppose."

Kabuto's mouth worked open, wheezed, snarled, toothless, tongueless. He wished that his master's brutal training had not given him so much mental strength... He wanted to surrender to madness, he wanted to be incapable of thinking, to stop hoping that this agony would stop, or that at least he would not be able to know it any longer. He could not stop the compulsion to try to heal the damage despite himself, regardless of how it prolonged his situation.

The steely scrape of the dagger scratching the bone jarred him to his spine. He could feel the blood, the new wound. Already the skin was closing around the places where the flesh was ripped free.

"There. All better now. I shall be sure to use this morsel to flavor your next meal, Kabuto-san. Truly, you are the most amazing subject I could have possibly imagined."

Kabuto moaned. How... How could this boy have trapped him so thoroughly? How was it that someone so young was a harder, a better, a more thorough torturer than Kabuto's own master? If only he hadn't been so damned careless, hadn't been taken in by the Uchiha's pretend fear and that blisteringly fast faux retreat through the empty rooms of his clan's central manor.

"Ah, would you look at that, Kabuto-san. Your flesh is actually trying to grow around this spike in your abdomen. I positioned that so well too – it missed all the vital organs, but now look, it's twisting because of the growth of new muscle. I shall have to reposition it again. We wouldn't want to puncture your intestines, after all... the resulting infection would probably overwhelm whatever life force you've got left healing you."

He howled at Sasuke, but it was only another reedy whisper. He could feel the iron moving through his flesh and it was pain both dull and sharp, throbbing, ebbing, constant and yet ever changing.

Sasuke's slender fingers gently touched Kabuto's face, pushed it this way and that. He peered at the eyes, at the dwindling hate, the shivering, overwhelming terror that was growing in anticipation of what would come next.

"Yes, I do think you're ready for another session. Please forgive me, Kabuto-san. Since I do not have the true Mangekyou, I am forced to such measures to make sure you are weak enough to be overwhelmed. And now, you will look at these precious eyes your master so covets."

Kabuto did not want to, but what could he do with no strength to stop it? He did not even have eyelids to close, and the small muscles that controlled the direction of his sight had been damaged by the presence of tiny needles. If he were a normal man, he would be blind already but he just could not stop his survival instinct, that desperate, deep need to live that Orochimaru had taught him to know so intimately, and so he kept trying to heal them, too, when he had the chakra, kept the glands to keep them moist going.

Cold sweat at the back of his neck, the backs of his knees. Murmuring. Begging. He tried to scream it through his gaze into Sasuke's cold, gleaming eyes. Please. No more.

That perfectly formed lip curled just ever so slightly more. "My dear Kabuto. You are whimpering already? But we haven't begun yet.

"Now," Sasuke blinked and in each eye the three tomoe appeared on a field of red, and then the black marks whirled faster and faster, and he blinked again and this time the black marks changed, grew, lengthened and twisted, became hook shapes that extended from each pupil out to the edge of the iris.

"Now, Kabuto-san, you may whimper. You will help me train my Tsukuyomi. And after, I will... help you hone your Inyu Shometsu.

"Let's see how far we can push your healing today, eh? And when I interrogate you in the special, shared place where our minds meet, where I can almost fully control all time and space, please remember to tell me all of the sensations you are feeling.

"All this is for a higher purpose, Kabuto-san, so be honest when you tell me how much it hurts."

Secrets were nothing, hard genjutsu-conditioned training that was supposed to counteract interrogation techniques was nothing, even his fear of his master was nothing.

Deep under the earth, yet not under the earth, in his own mind and yet not in his own mind, for painful, endless moments that were outside of time, Kabuto screamed as he was broken anew.

---end chapter 6


	7. Chapter 7

Life is short. I want to be a novelist at some point and I will not be able to be one if I spend any effort at writing anything other than the original story I'm putting time into. 

I still really dig the thought of a Berserk/Naruto crossover, because it's not been done and because I had good plans for it. But unfortunately, I really have many things that are more important to do.

I hope somebody is willing to continue it in the spirit the first chapters were written.

Added Feb 2008:

I welcome anybody and everybody who wants to continue this story. You don't need my permission. Just go to town with the story and credit me for the first chapters. If multiple people write continuations that are different from each other, so much the better. I'd love to read other versions of this crossover if that's what you want to do, or continuations of this story and see what direction you might go in.

I only ask that any writer who tries to pick it up should strive to improve their skills and abilities as they go on. Don't settle. If you know you have weaknesses in your writing, practice them. If you aren't comfortable with writing fight scenes, read essays on the ARMA website. If your description is weak, read good writers with rich texture like Tolkien and Nabokov. Don't settle for where you are - plan for where you want to be.


End file.
